Voice UI And Wearables Product Design

Product design work for Alexa's push into the wearables market

I had a wonderful time working with the Alexa design team on expanding Alexa's nascent reach into the wearables market. I worked on two projects for smart watches: "northstar" concept development for shaping product strategy, and then the first release of Alexa on Fossil watches (and second release on a consumer smart watch). I cannot show the northstar work here, but I can post some of the behind-the-scenes artifacts for the Fossil work on this page.

Fossil Release: Attention System Design

There were a lot of challenges in designing this implementation of Alexa on Fossil's Gen 6 smart watch: Alexa would have to share space with another famous AI assistant (Google Assistant) and work as a service on a 3rd party OS (Android's Wear OS). Not to mention having to quickly learn the nuances of app design for smart watches and work around its unique constraints.

One of the areas where I spent a lot time was adapting Alexa's attention system for the watch, which required some layout exploration followed by a series of tricky iterations of creating Lottie animations that I could handoff to the dev team for instant implementation.

If you're curious about the product release, here are a few links to some reading material:
Link to the Fossil product page
Link to an Engadget article

Alexa Attention System Animations I Adapted For Wearables

A Snippet from Attention System Layout Exploration

Fossil Release: Weather Intent Design

Weather is typically one of the most important features or "intents" for a general voice assistant to have. Most people have a need for anticipating weather, and it's also an easy on-boarding or unboxing interaction to present to people.

So, although a mundane aspect of everyday life, having a good design for the weather intent was critical for this release of Alexa on a partner's wearable. Design was a mix of exploring visual layouts for a wearable screen; understanding exactly what assets (visual, audio, and text) the Alexa service could deliver to a wearable for weather; and optimizing interactions for the on-the-go context for wearables.

Alexa Weather Wearable GUI Prototype (Via Adobe XD)

A few samples from Layout Exploration