An Inspiring Visit to Amazon Design
A few months ago, the Amazon Design team invited me to attend a Amazon Design Open House in Seattle. I accepted, and this post is the result of what I learned and observed at this motivational event.
It was a whirlwind of a day…filled with insightful speakers, a formal lunch with Amazon Design Leaders, a tour of a few Amazon locations, and a social mixer where I had a chance to meet and mingle with members from design teams across Amazon. My observations and insights from this inspirational opportunity are categorized below in three groups:
Design Focus — Key Strategies and Concepts
Innovation in Action — A Tour of Locations
An Asset Gained — Connections
Design Focused — Key Strategies & Concepts
Immediately, it was clear that Amazon values the impact of robust design; more so as they transition to deliver their own experiences and products. They’ve made significant investments in developing a superb design organization and are aggressively reaching out to the global design community to position Amazon as a leader in design.
Working Backward
A common theme throughout the day was the concept of working backward. In essence, starting the design process by first building an understanding and empathy for customers. By partnering with business leaders, the design team begins establishing a comprehensive view of the customer’s goals, challenges, and aspirations. Similar to our Zero-based Design Methodology, starting with the client first is essential to delivering solutions that elegantly serve client needs and aspirations. However, it is interesting to note that Amazon cautions against conducting too much research, as you can’t predict the future. Rather, they suggest getting ideas in front of customers early and often so that you can learn and incrementally improve.
Core Customer Benefit
Throughout the journey to understand customers, Amazon incorporates a few foundational questions to help measure knowledge and maturity of an idea.
1) Who is the customer?
2) What is the customer’s problem or opportunity?
3) Is the most important customer benefit clear?
4) How do you know what the customer needs or wants?
5) What does the customer experience look like?
Case Study in Working Backward: Prime Photos
Prime Photos, an emerging team at Amazon, presented their story and how they used the ‘working backward’ methodology to reimagine the photo experience in order to empower families to relive memories with depth and richness.
A Startup Mindset
A sizable part of Amazon works much like a group of independent startups each with autonomy to form their strategies. Understanding the Commander’s Intent, teams can independently drive towards a shared set of organizational goals. Teams sometimes even overlap problem spaces; however, instead of the usual friction, teams routinely cross-pollinate innovations and shared resources to further their overall progress.
Press Release
After research and knowledge of the customer crystallized, the Prime Photos business and design leaders drafted a Press Release — which is a required first step for new teams. The Press Release articulated, in future-tense, their solution and how it benefited the customer. The document was shared with other team members for a “work together, alone” session, in which members annotated and proposed changes. Collaboratively, the team distilled their insights into a draft Press Release for Customer Experience Bar Raisers (CXBR) to review and provide feedback.
Customer Experience Bar Raisers (CXBR)
A common practice at Amazon is to glean feedback from others outside of the responsible team. Always placing the customers first, the external group uses a formal, pragmatic approach to evaluate each idea as it moves throughout its maturity (e.g., press release, wireframes, marketing collateral, etc.). As a rule, the fidelity of mockups should match the sophistication of a design.
Data-informed Decisions
At Amazon, they believe data democracy helps make and validate choices. As an example, with the Prime Photos team, a feature that was assumed to have little use, was discovered by a designer to be used quite often. Because the designer had access to data, she was able to evaluate customer behavior and prevent a potential negative impact on the customer.
Emergence of Voice Experiences
Throughout the day, it was clear voice experiences are essential to Amazon’s future success. The term “Voice First Experiences” was used by several design teams; in fact, Prime Photos started as Voice First Experience. Also, a few new titles such as Voice User Interface (VUI) Designer and Sound Designer arose during our conversations.
New Cognitive Challenges
As designers, we continually balance the impact of the cognitive burden on customers while designing user interfaces and flows. With visual user interfaces, we rely on tangible visual references to relieve cognitive load or reduce memory recall for customers. In contrast, voice interfaces rely solely on memory recall and challenges are further compounded.
The design team highlighted these challenges through a series of fun and entertaining activities. One such activity used balls of varying size and shape; two participants would then throw the balls to each other while incrementally introducing more balls and sizes. The activity’s purpose is to illustrate the increased burdens placed on users when processing ambiguous information. I borrowed this exercise as a warmup for our last Zero-based Design Workshop.
During the workshop, the Voice Experience Design team shared a humorous story. While reviewing Amazon Alexa behavioral analytics, a strange and frequent error was occurring when people made phone calls. The term often seen was ‘Ghostbusters.’ Perplexed, the team researched and found the surprising cause. While people were interacting Alexa, they would say “Alexa, make a phone call” and Alexa would pose the question “Who are you going to call?” — which prompted the obvious answer : Ghostbusters. :-) The Alexa team used this insight to adapt Alexa’s response with a funny Easter Egg.
Innovation in Action — A Tour of Locations
Towards the end of the day, Amazon conducted a tour of some of their most innovative facilities.
Amazon Go
Amazon opened its first grocery store, Amazon Go, featuring no cashiers and the ability to purchase items via an app. I was able to tour Amazon’s innovative shopping experience and even buy a few snacks. It was interesting to hear, when discussing the experience with the Amazon Go design lead, that it’s common for shoppers to feel anxiety after they make the first couple of purchases; many thought they were doing something wrong. I’ll admit, I shared a similar feeling. I did take a few photos from the tour of Amazon Go, which I am sharing below.
Spheres
The Spheres are a place where Amazon employees can think and work in an environment that provides a connection to nature, where they are surrounded by plants and an organic-inspired soundscape. In downtown Seattle, three spheres cover a city block, the center sphere stands over 90 feet tall and 130 feet in diameter, flanked by two smaller spheres. The Spheres can house up to 800 Amazonians and boasts over 400 botanical species. Inside the Spheres are treehouse meeting rooms, a river and waterfalls, and a green “bird’s nest” conference room. The tour of the Spheres was quite remarkable. Below are a few photos of them.
An Asset Gained — Connections
Throughout the trip, I engaged with a spectrum of people from several of Amazon’s design teams (Amazon Alexa, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Prime Photos, Amazon Music, etc.). In particular, I spent considerable time with several Alexa Design Leads. We had the opportunity to discuss several potential voice-driven experiences and their ability to seamlessly blend into a customer’s daily routine. I left with excellent connections with the Alexa Skills team and useful knowledge to experiment further within the innovation center.
Summary
My trip to Amazon provided a marvelous opportunity to glean useful information on Amazon’s design methodology and discover valuable elements of their ecosystem. I’m looking forward to sharing and exploring these new concepts with others to further enhance our customer experience!
