Amazon Alexa
Alexa “Top Skills” Multi-Content Exploration
MY ROLE
UX Designer on Alexa Discovery team: led and owned design exploration and solution for Alexa Top Skills.
PROBLEM & TASK
Alexa “Skills” can acquire customers, but has a difficult time retaining them. The task was to explore ways that would help increase user skill retention and activation rates.
RESEARCH
I researched methods to increase user retention, and leveraged the findings and data to experiment with multiple design iterations that would help surface a best viable solution.
PROPOSED EXPERIMENT
Based on my research results and data, updating the Top Skills card design to feature more skills at a glance could increase skill retention and increase customer activation.
REQUIREMENTS
· Title of card
· Icon of skill
· Name of skill
· Secondary marketing text (optional)
· Utterance for each top skill
· Allow users to take an action via touch for each skill
TOOLS
Sketch, Quip, Adobe Photoshop, pen & paper.
Current “Top Skills” Card
Much of the current Top Skills card is blank space, showing one Skill.
Current page components:
· Icon of skill
· Title of card
· Skill rating
· Utterance for top skills
Current Top Skills card design
Required Components
Some card components are required including:
1. Icon of skill
2. Title of card
3. Name of skill
4. Secondary marketing text (optional)
5. Utterance for each Top Skill
6. Allow users to take an action via touch for each skill
Required card components
Exploration
RESEARCH
Retention
Statistics show that a higher retention rate can increase profits to 95%. This means it’s crucial to find the right customer experience to help user retention.
Engagement
Engagement is key to user retention. It indicates how many users interact with your product or service regularly. If you have a high user retention rate, people find value in your product or service and return to use it again.
One way to improve user retention is to focus on providing an excellent user experience. A well designed product will help keep users engaged. A product is considered to have good retention when its users keep coming back, and design plays a key role in making it happen.
Awareness
Many users do not know what Alexa’s capabilities are. Providing users with valuable and relevant content about top rated Alexa Skills can raise awareness, keep them engaged, encourage repeat purchases, and even turn them into advocates.
HYPOTHESIS
Based on my research and findings, my hypothesis was: crafting a new, engaging design that presents more Top Skills at once should increase customers individual skill retention, awareness and activation.
Being mindful of balance and space design principles, I set out to experiment and create design iterations to surface a viable solution.
Resource:
https://www.zendesk.com/blog/customer-retention
https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/how-memory-works
https://www.thealien.design/insights/ux-strategies-for-user-retention
https://passkit.com/blog/user-retention
Design Iterations
Design iterations explored layouts displaying various sets of skills: two, three and four skills at a glance. The experiment was to explore various layout combinations and test which design users would respond to best.
Save on time and cost using existing “Smart Home” template
Leveraging other existing Alexa card templates can save cost as well as valuable engineering time. I found that the Smart Home design template had components that were similar to the required components needed in this new card design, therefore, leveraged the new designs from it.
Two skills at a glance
The first design displays two top skills. This CX would be easiest for customers to view from six feet or less.
This design has all of the required components including:
Title of card
Icon of skill
Utterance for each top skill
Allows users to take an action via touch for each skill
I combined the name of the skill within the utterance hint text to allow less clutter on the page while still meeting the component requirements.
Studies show that designs using less clutter can help with easier readability. Also, engaging designs with visually-appealing content can help raise individual skill awareness, retention and activation.
Three skills at a glance
Displays three skills at once, helping raise individual skill awareness and retention.. Also, designs with visually-appealing content can help with with individual skill awareness, retention and activation.
This design has all of the required components including:
Title of card
Icon of skill
Utterance for each top skill
Allows users to take an action via touch for each skill
Four skills at a glance
Out of all iterations, this ‘list view’ design has the most viewable skills, and allows users to view four skills at once. This is the maximum number of skills recommended on a card design without making it too difficult to read and retain the content.
This allows customers to quickly see multiple skills with just one glance while also helping with skill awareness, retention and activation.
This design has all of the required components including:
Title of card
Icon of skill
Utterance for each top skill
Allows users to take an action via touch for each skill
Upon further review…
After presenting design iterations to my team, questions surfaced regarding readability and accessibility. One main issue discussed was that - if too much information was displayed, users could have a difficult time reading and retaining skills and skill information resulting in possible churn.
MORE RESEARCH
Research was completed and data gathered regarding user readability from various distances. Some studies recommend that in order for text to be legible at 6 feet away, use at least a 30 pt. font or higher.
CONCLUSION
The readability and accessibility research results overrode designs that might be difficult to read from six feet of more. Therefore, the design displaying two skills at a glance surfaced as the best viable design solution.
Final design: Two skills at a glance
I chose a beautiful background image (via Amazon Alexa resource) that was consistent with the Amazon Alexa brand, and wouldn’t compete with the various skill iconography. The result was a clean, engaging design that not only looked delightful, but was also easily accessible and readable.
Accessibility
The two skills at a glance design was the best solution because of possible accessibility/readability issues. Viewing two skills at once is much easier for users to read from 6 feet away or less, while also helping to raise individual skill retention, awareness, and activation.
Requirements
Combining the name of the skill within the utterance hint text allowed for a cleaner design with less clutter on the page while meeting the component requirements.
Next Steps
After deploying and slowly dialing up the new Top Skills card design, we will closely monitor the user data to see how users respond. After reviewing the user data, our team will learn from the results, decide on next steps, and gain valuable insight for future initiatives.