The core of our idea of ‘Amazon being your friend’ manifested in a personal shopping assistant. This assistant would show itself through a series of interactions in a pop-up style. Instead of an onboarding experience, we wanted to create a ‘non-boarding’ experience. Whereby the personal shopping assistant would build a continuous relationship with you, get to know you and provide more appropriate recommendations.
This personal assistant would later evolve to become Alexa, which was inspired by a discussion with our tutor Hillary. Integrating Amazons Alexa, which is a virtual assistant, seemed to make sense as we were effectively creating an assistant.
Coupled with this integration of Alexa, we integrated two more features into the redesign. The first feature introduced was the addition of a calendar which then linked to our second innovation, the inclusion of a board’s section. These were the core components of our redesign and underpinned by a clean UI free from advertisements and unnecessary clutter inspired by our visual mood board. By removing all this unwanted ‘traffic’, we aimed to create a more streamlined app that showed a greater understanding of the users shopping requirements. In hindsight, the inclusion of Alexa may have been confusing for people. You interact with Alexa through voice which was not our intention for our user testing. We introduced Alexa as a way to integrate another Amazon product into the application. As well as the fact that Alexa is known as an assistant.
We outlined four tasks for our user testing, incorporating all of the above new features. We met as a group and did some sketching out of the user flow. With the user flow defined, we then split the tasks to design. Andre looked at task one, Clodagh task, and I did task two and three. From here, we started to develop the designs in Figma. The design phase is always an enjoyable part, and where so much of the work done prior becomes realised. Figma is an excellent program for collaboration, as you are all literally on the same page. By being able to see everyone’s updates made it easy to retain consistency
We worked within the Amazon brand guidelines and included Alexa’s brand guidelines as well through the logo, colour blue and an italic serif font for Alexas interactions. By working within these guidelines, we felt the new features we introduced would be easier to absorb.
Overall I was relatively happy with the end product. Although I did feel we may have got carried away with too many additional features. By including all these features, we overloaded our workload. Which resulted in the features not sitting within our design as well as I would have wished. Consequently, this then impeded on the UI design.
Amazon Redesign 