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This year Amazon made a lot of new announcements…which means I can share a lot of new announcements. For these new products, I elevated and created motion design systems, built new patterns that scale across Amazon’s Echo ecosystem, and worked directly with engineering to lead the effort to build new features for our devices. Some of these announcements are:
- Lets Chat: A Generative AI experience that allows you to chat with Alexa more conversationally
- Echo Hub: Our first smart home forward hub that allows you to customize and manage your smart home devices
- Echo Show 8: New designs, including an adaptive home screen. This allows the UI to fluidly transition from far field to near field based on your distance from the device.
Here is a summary video of some of the features announced this year:
Let’s Chat
Roles: concept design / motion design
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Well this is a big one. We’re combining large language models (LLM) with real-world context to make Alexa more intuitive, intelligent, and useful. Using generative AI, speaking to Alexa will feel more natural and conversational than ever before, and Alexa’s ability to reason, infer customer intent, and understand complex requests will remarkably improve.
I led the initiative to create a new framework that allows us to utilize animated vector backgrounds. This unblocks the motion team to deliver highly detailed animations and provide Scalable Vector Graphic files to engineering (similar to a Lottie file). Vector animations are extremely small in file size and do not lose resolution when scaled across many devices. I also helped establish the entry and exit animation behavior for the chat feature.
Let’s Chat articles:
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Previewing the future of Alexa – Amazon
Echo Hub
Roles: concept design / motion design / interaction design / micro animations
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The Echo Hub is our first device centered around an automated home. Unlike other Echo Shows, the Hub’s interface is a fully customizable control panel of widgets that allow you to manage all of your smart home devices.
With the latest LLM, Alexa will also be able to process multiple smart home requests at the same time, make inferences, and customers will be able to setup complex Routines, entirely by voice.
I was the lead motion designer for this project. I helped build and utilize a brand new Adaptive Framework for the Home Screen. This new feature allows the interface to seamlessly switch between a far mode (simple, larger content for legibility) and a near mode (more dense design allowing for utility).
I created reusable motion tokens and patterns that scale across the experience. Other features I worked on for this device:
- Idle Screen & Clocks
- Scaleable motion patterns
- Motion tokens
- Home Screen
- Page Transition patterns
- Widget latency patterns
- Micro Animations (Lottie/SVG)
- Partial Panel patterns
Read more about the design on my project page.
Echo Hub articles:
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Introducing a new era for the Alexa smart home – Amazon
Echo Show 8
Roles: concept design / motion design / interaction design
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The Echo Show 8 design now shows larger, simplified content when you are far away. This mode shines when used with voice commands. When you step closer to the device, it will seamlessly transform into a more dense, detailed view that is more touch forward.
I was a part of the team that created the original concepts for Adaptive Design of the device. From our initial framework, the team expanded it to a series of new layouts.
Echo Show 8 articles:
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Amazon’s new Echo Show 8 changes its home screen the closer you get – Android Authority
Goodbye Amazon. Hello VML!
After three amazing years at Amazon, I am moving onto my newest role as a Senior Motion Designer for VML. Stay tuned as I share moments from my new adventure 🎉