Amazon Kids Redesign
As the Creative Director of the UX and Visual Design team, I lead the initiative to update the design system of Amazon Kids (FreeTime) with the goal to improve content engagement and Amazon Kids+ subscription retention. A personalized content discovery experience designed specifically for kids, ages 3-12.
Roles & Responsibilities
Roadmap and design resource planning to support the redesign and ongoing incremental UI and feature design.
Engaged with partner organizations across Amazon to ensure marketing and development support for the launch of the new UX and ongoing addition of features.
Planned and engaged research to validate the feature set and incremental usability testing.
Engaged executive leadership to raise visibility and drive the team to incorporate product feedback.
Fostered an ongoing partnership with Engineering and Product leadership across multiple organizations at Amazon to define the go-to-market strategy, roadmaps, feature backlogs, and product iterations based on customer and usage data feedback.
Optimized resources and developed organizational efficiencies through leading the design of systems that can scale across Amazon products and services.
Developed and introduced design processes that enable the Kids Experience team to deliver creative, beautiful, and engaging designs.
BACKGROUND
Unlike adults, children’s abilities, needs, and interests change quickly. In just one year, 4-year-old experiences significant cognitive, motor, and technical growth. What engages a 6-year-old is vastly different than what engages a 12-year-old. The redesigned kid’s UI keeps these changes in mind and is designed to grow with a child as they mature.
When I first joined the Amazon Devices team in 2016, one of my first projects was to help redesign and launch a new tablet customer experience (CX) for kids. It was clear that the current design system could not scale to accommodate the addition of new content, features, and device types. Many customer pain-points were discovered through both engagement metrics and customer reviews.
I introduced the Amazon Kids organization to design thinking workshops that were deployed across a the 200+ people organization. This strategy resulted in the development of a scalable, cross-device design system.
THE RESULT
Amazon Kids design moved content discovery to the home screen through layouts with mixed content and genre rows. It is responsive and includes a flexible grid that ensures consistency across layouts and breakpoints. The UI is also media-type aware and can adapt from mobile phones to TV (e.g. 10-foot) environments. The design encourages endless discovery by introducing content interstitial pages with controls that make downloading, launching, and removing content easier. The new design system also optimized the organization's resources, reducing the number of designers and engineers needed to support new and incremental features.
Parent Dashboard & UI Redesign
Along with the launch of the new CX components, I was tasked with the UX design of the Parent Dashboard App. A new feature that includes parental controls. I worked closely with Marketing and Engineering teams to build the most customer centric designs and A/B tested various iterations.
We tested designs and messaging benefits across multiple devices. The screenshots showcase the app's main features and user interface elements, such as buttons, navigation bars, and interactive elements.
