For this internship, I worked with the Video Immersive Experiences (VIX) team, defining how customers interacted with all video content across Amazon Music. This includes music videos, artist interviews, Twitch livestreams and much more.
My project focused on designing a new stories feature for the service, showcasing a variety of short form video content right on the home page.
The business goal of my project was to increase video engagement for our young adult (YA) fans. YA customers closely engage with short form content as evidenced by popular social media apps like TikTok and Instagram Reels.
From a product perspective, short form videos can also serve as an important stepping stone for future content types.
To solve for the pain point, I designed a stories player new to Amazon Music. Stories are short form videos, focused on creating a more immersive video experience by showcasing fresh and relevant content for customers. Content ranges from music video clips to interviews to exclusive Amazon Music originals.
Since stories were also meant to link to other part of the Amazon Music app, the UI of the player itself is simple and straightforward. With one primary button, users can explore artist profiles, playlists, music videos and much more.
I began my design process with a competitive analysis of how other apps present stories, looking at everything from Youtube Shorts to Instagram Reels and of course TikTok. From there, I was able to get a better sense of things like aspect ratios and layout.
Since Stories touched other features on the platform, I made user flows to map out how they would all connect with each other. This helped align different teams, especially when working with developers. I presented this user flow to the developers and engineers on my team, and received feedback on increasing ways to keep customer exploring video content.
As I moved on to higher stages of fidelity, I explored different visual treatments for story thumbnails. I've shown only a small snippet of the 50 or so iterations I went through. The other major area of focus was ensuring flexibility with future jumping off points in the story player itself.
After showing these iterations at different critique sessions, I honed in on card designs that used less visual elements like borders and gradients. One designer suggested that by simplifying the cards more, it would feel more integrated into the product as a whole instead of sticking out. With this piece of feedback in mind, I made more iterations that leveraged existing design system components.
Since this feature was a full screen experience, I also focused on fine tuning animations and interactivity. This was my first time diving into animation and I experimented with similar experiences on other apps to get a better sense of timing and transitions.
I learned so much from this internship, and a large part of that was due to the amazing design team! My manager, Matthew Spagenberg, and my mentors, Ian Kemp and Christian Ong, made this experience extremely rewarding. Special thanks to my fellow interns Bhavya and Tien who made the entire internship that much better!
