Amazon

The intersection of design and engineering

At Amazon, I had the chance to work with the Kindle Mayday team as a UX Designer for the redesign of the kindle pen-tool & the customer front of the kindle mayday application. With the support of my team, I researched and designed features for Kindle. Additionally, I assisted in UX research, helping craft surveys and usability studies. While I cannot display samples of my process, I can tell you about how I spent my time at Amazon. To see my design process in-depth, check-out my Microsoft case-study.

The Kindle Mayday app is spread across all kindle devices

Problem: Making 'troubleshooting & seeking help' a more personal and friendlier experience

When Kindle users have questions or need help with using the device, Mayday allows users to talk to a live Amazon customer service representative with a tap of a button. The goal was to make this experience less corporate and produce a feeling of a more personal & a friendlier experience. So the UI & UX had to be re-designed.

Designing with customer obsession

Context: User Empathy

When a user taps the help button on any of the Kindle devices, a live customer service representative pop's up on the screen to help. The representative can see the user's device's screen and also write on it via pen-tool. This pen-tool needed to not look invasive, or corporate and needed a more personal touch.

When you draw with a stylus or a pen tool on a tablet, the device samples the x & y coordinates of your pen and interpolates a curve along with the sampled dots. This process can be skewed to favor speed, smoothness or accuracy. If the pen tool was being used by an artist to draw a digital Mona Lisa, you'd favor the accuracy of the pen. However, if this is being used by a customer rep to draw basic shapes and arrows on a screen to guide a user through the app, the preferred quality of the pen tool would be speed rather than accuracy. One of the challenges was also to optimize the pen tool to better suit the use cases and the nature of the application. You may read the thesis I wrote about this topic below.

What I learned

This was a very specialized role that I had at Amazon. I really got to understand Amazon's customer-driven approach to design. Being a part of Amazon's design process was truly an enriching experience. Spending my time working alongside engineers, user researchers, visual designers, and product managers has really shaped my own experience as a designer.

Vector Mathematics

This is a side report I wrote on the speed vs accuracy of the pen tool.

Please scroll through the PDF below.