Alexa's Insights

Duration

September 2022 - March 2023

Alexa surfaces insights from reviews, customer QnA, and product information to provide a high level overview of an ASIN. Which aims to help customers decide if a product meets their consideration criteria, and saves them the time of having to sort through information on detail pages.

Roles

UX Design, UX Research

Partners

Product managers, UX designers

What did I do exactly?

When I first joined back the Alexa Shopping team in August 2022 following my internship and senior at SCAD: I became the sole design owner for the mobile detail page widget Alexa's Insights, which previously owned by another senior designer. Over the course of the next 7 months I synthesized all of the previous work done, facilitated brainstorming workshops with partner teams for future iterations, conducted & affinitized user research to validate concepts, and contributed to the widget initial launch in October of 2022.

Who were the types of partners you worked with and how?

Product managers: I worked closest with my product manager partner day to day to align or prioritize on weekly action items, as well as share both near term and future state design explorations. With both us being the sole owners of the widget, we worked very closely together to plan how we could improve the CX. We did this by using the customer data available to us after launch, anticipating the future contents sources that would be made available, and constantly evaluating how to best to present the information in the widget to customers.

UX Designers: Despite being the only design owner for Alexa’s Insights, I still worked with other UX designers on the larger Alexa Shopping team to gather their input and feedback on the designs I was working on. I would either utilize our weekly design studio sessions to share with a larger group, or set up 1:1’s with individual designers if my designs directly correlated with their verticals.

Here are a few of the bigger things I contributed

1. Detail Page Widget Launch

October 2022

In collaboration with AShop Community Insights team, we launched 'Alexa's Insights' widget on Amazon App product details page. The widget can be found below the fold and above community QA widget for select products. The experience was launched in US and IN across 4 high consideration product types (Headphones, Laptops, Cell phones and Television) for head ASINs that had high customer traffic. Customers spend a lot of time reading through details page to learn about the products they are considering. They are looking for both factual information such as specifications, dimensions, and usage information as well as validation from other customers on the quality of the product. With so much information spread on the detail pages, it's hard for customers to find the information they are looking for and evaluate each product. 'Alexa's Insights' widget helps customers get a quick overview of the product they are considering by surfacing key insights generated from customer reviews and product information.

2. Partner Team Think Big Workshops

November 2022

In November of 2022, I facilitated a two day workshop in London with over 25+ key partners (Product, Engineering, Science, and Design) from Seattle, London, and Israel. The purpose of the workshop is to validate the problem space, solutions proposed and come up with CX ideas as part of working backwards process for Alexa’s Insights. Previously me and product manager partner had identified six different types of insights we wanted to think big on going into 2023: Product summaries, review aspects, feature validations, web summaries, pricing, and post purchase. Each of the six teams was assigned one these types of insights to generate big ideas on what would be the most helpful information could we surface and how we would visualize that content. We used the outcomes of the offsite to further refine these concepts for future weblabs, as well as improve our team mechanisms and collaboration with partner teams.

3. 2023 UX Research

Feb 2023 - March 2023

I conducted research on both the detail page and search CX for Alexa’s Insights that I presented in person to partners in London. We tested a new iteration of the Alexa's Insights detail page widget on usertesting.com with 10 customers, to gain insight on what changes we needed to make in the near term to the CX. We also completed a study with 8 customers in OpenLabs, sharing the future search explorations to learn what big ideas we should lean into over the next near. While the Alexa Shopping UXR team organized the customer insights from the OpenLabs study, I completed an affinity mapping exercise for the usertesting.com study to organize and group all of the customer insights myself. After all ten participants finished the study, design completed an affinity mapping exercise to group the common themes of customer feedback. In total we had 397 data points (yellow stickies) that I organized into 71 themes (blue stickies) to reach 44 overarching customer insights (green stickies). The outcome of this research both impacted both the near term experiments we were planning to launch, and for future “think big” explorations we were considering working back from.