When Amazon expanded their Fire TV product portfolio to include the new Omni series, it opened up opportunity for our design team to explore what the device is capable of, for customer needs beyond streaming content. Our teams identified that our TVs go underutilized during a majority of the day — with peak usage starting only after 7:00PM.

The core UX team for designing Ambient Mode consisted of myself — a specialist in visual design — one lead, and two interaction designers. Together, we defined the core CX for Ambient. It was my role to drive decision making in parallel with each designer from a visual design system standpoint, and finalize all sections of the product in high fidelity for engineering.

The centerpiece of the Ambient experience was its home. With the goal of maintaining a minimal interface, Ambient Home lets customer art and photography take focus. From the clock and weather, to the now-playing music indicator and artist attribution, I defined the visual style and framework for each Home component.

Working in partnership with the Echo Show team, domain experiences were scaled onto Fire TV through widgets we explored and designed. I built the visual framework states for how customers understood remote interactions here. Widgets are offered in two sizes, and reflected the same experiences as an Echo Show device.

This experience was a partial answer to serve customer needs in the living room, beyond normal streaming content. With Alexa, adaptive brightness, and presence detectors embedded into the device, this always-on state and additional of personalized content combines both Fire TV and Echo Show experiences through Alexa Widgets.

In 2023, text-to-image AI models in chat-based LLMs came into the spotlight. With art being a key focus for the Ambient Experience, why not let customers generate their own art for the living room — by just asking? My work would be the team’s first approach into integration of conversational, generative AI features into their television devices.

As visual owner of the Ambient Experience, I worked closely with the lead designer to develop the feature. I worked with internal engineering teams who developed basic image generation tools with the Stable Diffusion v1.5 model, to which I was able to utilize and create imagery for our interfaces.

A common pain point for Fire TV customers is the ability to know and learn new Alexa capabilities. Voice assistants require knowledge of prompts, and implementing new voice experiences meant that customers need to be clearly taught how to ingress into them.

Customers often take hints at face value — they don’t dive much deeper into experimentation if they think the range of prompts are limited. I developed a variety of educational moments within the Fire TV UI, using casual instances of copy, iconography, and example images throughout the experience to nudge the customer forward.

Ambient mode first launched with limited customization settings for Art Mode, but among the offered was the ability to toggle borders styles, minimize layout visuals, and set display hours. I built custom components and explored new iconography for easy navigation through Fire TV Settings patterns.

I developed visuals for the remainder of the experience, which included new key screens, latency patterns, onboarding screens for specific Fire TV devices, tile art, and even widget designs. Designs were incorporated into the Ambient folders for delivery, and I worked hard to even improve areas of communication for the engineering teams — learning from each spec I delivered for Ambient.

This project gave me valuable experience learning how to distill new generative AI technology into a digestible feature for a Fire TV product. It’s so satisfying building innovative features and watching them grow!

My primary focus — as one of three visual designers owning areas on Fire TV — was Settings and OOBE (Out of Box Experiences). Working alongside design and engineering, I created visual interaction specifications for new user experiences pertaining to these areas.

OOBE experiences were especially important. With so many different devices and partners that feed into Fire TV, I needed to make sure that all new onboarding user flows were smooth and aligned with our design system. New concepts that came down the pipeline were vetted by myself for visual approval and development of the final specifications to engineers.