Amazon (Prime Video) case study

UX Designer II

My role

Working on Tools and the X-Ray experience, I had the opportunity to own each part of the design process. This product space has complex dependencies and is highly technical. My daily work required me to work closely with engineering and product teams to align engineering and product requirements. I worked on projects from concept to release. Projects I have worked on require multi-faceted work streams - from sketches to low fidelity wireframes for product requirement definition to high fidelity designs and light prototypes. I was required to consistently present my work to our dependent teams and leaders at any level. I constantly work to find ways to re-define and incorporate our users to more accurately educate and back up our design decisions - no matter the budget or constraints. I also worked with 3rd party companies like FOX, HBO and others to ensure our tooling was useful for their content delivery.

My general process

1. Project creation

  • Work with Project Managers to gather requirements

  • Work on the overall vision of the project

2. Identifying the team

  • Meet with Product Managers involved with the project to set syncs dates

  • Close in to what Engineering team will be working on the project and set sync dates

3. Research, wireframing and iteration

  • Deeply research a project (competitive analysis, guerrilla tests, work with UxR)

  • Create user personas

  • Use requirements to create multiple wireframes and flows

4. Design and product reviews

  • Review with stakeholders in design, product and engineering

  • Gather feedback and iterate

5. Release and monitor

  • Create key screens in hi-fi

  • Define patterns and styles

  • Redlines

6. Ship and track

  • Provide redlines to Engineering

  • Sync with Engineering during production

  • Analyse results on product release

Project showcase: X-Ray for Live Events

Please note: some information is omitted to protect company privacy.

This was a defining project for me in my career - I began this project thinking it was more of a ‘fun’ project - it turned into something bigger. It became the impetus for a contract with the NFL. I was given the task:

“If we used our X-Ray feature for Live Sports - what would it look like?”

X-Ray was previously used for video content that had IMBD style information - who is in this scene, what song is playing, bonus content (hey - that was my internship project!). So it was my job to figure out how this content enrichment feature could apply to a new type of content.

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Planning

This phase of the project was based around research, requirements and wireframing. The major tasks done and artifacts created during this time were:

  1. User personas, competitive analysis, and content research (sports)

  2. A list of requirements to fit business and user needs (worked with PM to create)

  3. Defining, prioritizing and organizing the exact content that we will have from our sports information provider

  4. Multiple solutions in hand-drawn wireframes

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Refine and validate

During the design phase, the key is to iterate and validate. This is through multiple sketches, wireframes and flows put to review by peers, stakeholders and user tests. The key takeaways during this phase for this project were:

  1. Multiple wireframes made from pen and paper to digital in Sketch at a low fidelity and iterated on several times

  2. Reviews (formal or informal) daily with the design team

  3. Reviews twice weekly with PMs and Engineering

  4. Reviews bi-weekly with high-level stakeholders (Directors, VP etc.)

  5. Guerrilla tests around the office to ensure interaction was clear as we iterated quickly

  6. After the interaction design was locked down, I started to focus on making beautiful visuals

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Deliver and complete

When delivering this project, I created the following:

  1. A final review presentations to the design team, PMs, VP and the NFL (presented by my manager on behalf of me)

  2. Gave redlines to the Engineering team by working with them to ensure it fit their current working architecture

  3. Hand-off check-ins and reviews as the product was being developed.

Other projects

Due to confidentiality within my work, I cannot post details of my projects. If you want to learn more about my work, send me an email (daviswanless@gmail.com)

However, below I have outlined some of the subject areas of the projects I have had the opportunity to participate in.

  1. Internal content asset management system

  2. End to end onboarding for our Prime Video Direct system partners (FOX, HBO, various post houses etc.)

  3. Multi-user ux solutions

  4. RITE user testing prototypes

  5. Toggling multi-view experience in playback