Amazon | 2018

Alexa App: Smart Home

Over two years, I worked to turn Alexa into a world class smart home control experience.

Goal

The goal was to turn the Echo speaker into a full-blown smart home hub, including in-app smart home device control.  

Challenges

The Alexa app wasn't built to support smart home use cases, as it was effectively just a website rendered in an app wrapper. We needed to rebuild the app to be native, with a corresponding scaleable design system.

Mental Model

By isolating the control interface, it allowed us to plan for a phased rollout plan with partners. Building on the idea of isolating the control layer, we also isolated the settings later, which made the whole heirarchy work as a system.

Validated

With the help of my research partner, extensive usability testing refined the design model, and provided confidence in my design proposal.

Refined

In collaboration with Alexa's production design team, I helped form Alexa's first ever icon library. With the icons corresponding to Echo and smart home device types.

Scaled

Because everything had to be converted to React Native, all patterns introduced had to be re-usable. I worked with Alexa's production design production team to ensure all components were defined and contributed to an overall design system.