Amazon Glow

Role: UX Design Technologist

I joined this project in 2017 when it was a team of 10, and did a variety foundational UI/UX work to define and prove out the core experience. It launched in late 2021. I am super excited to see it out in the real world!

Background on the product:

Amazon Glow gives 3–8 year olds a way to connect meaningfully with remote family members. It adds depth to a typical video call through activities like reading, drawing, and games, which makes the call more engaging for the child. This is done through a built-in projector, coupled with touch input.

Research finds positive lifelong outcomes are strongly tied to healthy relationships at this early age. Modern families are often geographically displaced, and so phone & video calls are the only way to connect regularly. But without a dedicated device, the calls are usually brief, shallow, tough to schedule, and require a local caregiver’s time and attention.

What I worked on

(1/7) Proving hypotheses fast with scrappy prototypes

Early in the project, we did not know whether a projector would be an effective tool for holding a child’s attention. Instead of spending weeks building full-fledged prototypes, I designed and built a handful of faked-out activities in PowerPoint, and tested them with a team member’s child, cleverly timing interactions with the arrow keys to get him to jump, catch, and play with physical objects. This rapidly proved our hypotheses. I continued to use PowerPoint to rapidly “sketch” any new ideas I had for activities or interactions.

(2/7) Activity design process

What should the core activities for this platform be? How do you define a ‘successful’ call with a child? Everyone connects and plays differently. I helped develop design principles for qualifying & selecting activities. I also scrubbed top board, card, and video games to collect common play mechanics and categories, and then hosted internal game-inventing sessions to generate dozens of new activity ideas. Later, we developed our own activity design document template to comprehensively detail the rules and design of each activity.

(3/7) Defining the projected play area

How big should the projected area be? How bright? What about the resolution? What type of touch inputs make sense? I developed hypotheses, designed and conducted user tests, and wrote reports providing detailed answers for each of those questions. Not all questions had straightforward answers; to spec the resolution, I first had to find out which children’s books would not be readable at a certain resolution, and why. I ran multiple tests with the most popular children’s books, and discovered that resolution is actually just 1 of 3 key factors that determine readability.

(4/7) Building a prototype platform

How do you prototype an activity that runs on 2 devices in separate locations? It is not as simple as whipping something up in Figma. I worked closely with a web developer to build progressively more advanced prototype platforms, so that we could gather the insights we needed. I also worked with the user researcher to design and run tests & write reports.

(5/7) Pitch video

A year into the project, I made a 3-minute video that got shown to Jeff Bezos. It was a culmination of research done in our lab, where customers outlined their problems, played with our early prototypes, and expressed their desire to have a product like Glow. In that meeting, Jeff was convinced to make Glow a reality, and so our team grew.

(6/7) High-fidelity prototypes

At some point we needed high-fidelity prototypes - ones that looked and behaved like the real deal. I evaluated a few different platform options, and then worked with a small team to build this new platform. I also helped build some of these prototypes in Unity / C#, including an interactive Netflix-style shelf system for proving out the connected browsing experience.

(7/7) Designing native activities

Remote play involves new ways of interacting. I researched other game systems with novel input methods - like Nintendo Wii and XBox Kinect - to gather insights around designing native games, versus porting existing games. I held play sessions with these platforms where I constrained people’s ideas for activities, and then let them run wild. Those wild ideas provided great new concepts for core activities.