Direct 1st party customers of Fire TV average watch times of 12 hrs and 9 hrs for streaming content and live content, respectively. They’re young, majorly use technology, and stream content on multiple devices. On the other side, our 3rd party customers are entertainment providers — Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc. — who partner with Fire TV to monetize their brand on device.

To better understand the needs of my customers, I dove into internal user research studies, concept narratives, and existing analytical product reviews. I also conducted 1:1s with the members of my team to learn more about the various product areas they owned and the reasons for implemented features.

Among the information, I found that:

Customers were unsatisfied with the recommendations Fire TV was providing them, not fitting their preferences as well as they’d like. Wrong suggestions mean disruption in routines and stagnancy in their personal content.

Customers expressed frustrations when having to spend extra time navigating to find content they want to watch. They wished for a quicker, more personalized way to navigate to avoid delayed navigation and decrease clutter.

Customers felt like there was a lack of customization options, making them feel like they have less control over their profiles. The scarcity of personalized capabilities only decreased the feeling of control.

In true Amazonian fashion, I distilled my findings into key questions. These informed my design solutions and set a solid foundation for the types of pain points that Fire TV customers were facing.

How might we...

“I want my FireTV to display new content in a delightful way, personalized for me, so I don’t get interrupted by other content that is not relevant to my experience”

“I want to start streaming my content as quickly as possible and have the opportunity to organize my content to fit my personal preference.”

“I want my FireTV experience to bring me delight by matching my unique personality”

And of course, what does all of this mean for business partners? If we know that Fire TV is built off of content — that is provided by our business partners — and customers are looking for chances to personalize this content further, then there are opportunities to monetize different levels of immersion that users will face.

To bring delight to customers while easing their experience, I surmised that the inclusion of customized profile traits and enhanced organizational capabilities of the interface would positively influence trigger-based a feedback loop of recommendations for personalized content. Dependent on the length of a user’s time spent on Fire TV, these features could trigger and influence a customer’s algorithmic suggestions:

For the ultimate personalized experience, we could partner with our providers and allow full UI changes to the interface that would be packaged in themes. These could range from moderate UI immersion through basic Fire TV branded designs, or be fully immersive UI offered through monetized partner content. By seeing visuals that are more catered to their tastes, customers would be more engaged in browsing.

To incentivize browsing, we could offer Unlockable Badges and Themes. When customers unknowingly complete a task, Fire TV rewards the customer for their behavior and awards them with customizations to apply to their profile. Collections can also be recommended to a user. These are lists curated by Fire TV based upon a customer's behavior and routine. Thus, the recommendations can encompass a variety of moods, routines, likes, and more.

As a low hanging fruit, we could give customers the ability to customize their Fire TV browse interface layouts for ease of navigation and viewing preference. By simply allowing the number of tiles in a row or grid to adjust from 3 to 4, or even 4 to 5, customers can find content more easily. New users could feel more comfortable going back, knowing that it is more fit to their needs.

One of my favorite projects (to be completely bias), with a large impact! In my internship days, I worked in a small team of three to develop the iconic illustrations for Fire TV Profiles. We worked in collaboration with the illustration agency Gunner Studio, who brought our vision to life.

I’m immensely grateful to have been the designer who created the initial art direction, from mood boards to conceptualization. With the help of my team, we brought a solid vision to our partners for creation. Fire TV Profiles is a popular choice for Fire TV customers, and now, even Prime Video customers.

As the bulk of my internship project focused on enhancing the current browsing experiencing, I would’ve liked to take the project further and investigate how these options should be introduced to a customer before they begin browsing. How might we introduce themes and customizations into a customer's onboarding experience, giving them access and knowledge from the very start?

Secondly, more testing should be conducted with my project. As I was not able to conduct testing with real customers due to working remotely, it would be helpful to get insights from customers on each feature's usability and engagement. These metrics will help determine whether my features line up well with customer insights and garner a better Fire TV experience.