Prime Music on Fire Tablet
Company: Amazon
Timeline: Sep 2013 - Jun 2014
Role: UX Lead for Music app on Fire Tablet working with UX Lead for Prime Music across Amazon Music ecosystem and tablet Music Store designer.
This was a very collaborative all-hands-on-deck project that completely revamped our strategy and product. Prime Music is a subscription service included with your Prime membership. Our plan was to launch on all clients simultaneously so there was a Prime design team that took the first stab at designs and consulted with each client team for feedback. I owned the Fire Tablet client.
Once high level designs were more settled by the Prime Music team, I was responsible for filling out the details for Fire Tablet, delivering the behavior specifications, the final mocks, the assets in all resolutions, fielding all questions from development, working with QA to ensure things were looking and behaving up to snuff, and of course iterating the design as insights came in from surveys, bug bashes and beta feedback to adjust the design. There were many technical challenges that arose during the 6+ months of development in which I’d consult with developers on options and CX consequences, then draft a proposal which I’d share back to the Prime Music team so they could update the ecosystem-wide standard.
Here were the initial requirements which we delivered on:
And some context and tenets:
Before Prime, we were a 2-way system: Store and Library/Player. We needed to prioritize how to position Prime to our users given that historical context. Here were our guiding principles.
Timeline: Sep 2013 - Jun 2014
Role: UX Lead for Music app on Fire Tablet working with UX Lead for Prime Music across Amazon Music ecosystem and tablet Music Store designer.
This was a very collaborative all-hands-on-deck project that completely revamped our strategy and product. Prime Music is a subscription service included with your Prime membership. Our plan was to launch on all clients simultaneously so there was a Prime design team that took the first stab at designs and consulted with each client team for feedback. I owned the Fire Tablet client.
Once high level designs were more settled by the Prime Music team, I was responsible for filling out the details for Fire Tablet, delivering the behavior specifications, the final mocks, the assets in all resolutions, fielding all questions from development, working with QA to ensure things were looking and behaving up to snuff, and of course iterating the design as insights came in from surveys, bug bashes and beta feedback to adjust the design. There were many technical challenges that arose during the 6+ months of development in which I’d consult with developers on options and CX consequences, then draft a proposal which I’d share back to the Prime Music team so they could update the ecosystem-wide standard.
Here were the initial requirements which we delivered on:
- Unlimited on-demand access and playback to over one million songs
- Music for any mood with programmed playlists
- Ability to mix Prime Music songs with the customer's owned songs
- Offline playback
- Stations allowing full control of playback with unlimited skips and repeat plays
- Ad-free listening
- Included with Amazon Prime membership
And some context and tenets:
Before Prime, we were a 2-way system: Store and Library/Player. We needed to prioritize how to position Prime to our users given that historical context. Here were our guiding principles.
- Respect the customer's library
- Promote Prime over Store
- Remove friction to playback
FTU Flow
Inserting Prime into the Library
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Library Artist Detail with Prime Collapsed 
Library Album Detail with Prime Collapsed
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Prime Expanded 
Prime Expanded
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App Architecture
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Recently Added to Cloud Playlist
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Prime Playlists in Library
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Prime in Store
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Early Iterations
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Prime Library Drawer Concept
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Library and Prime Home
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Success!
Prime Music launched June 12, 2014 and was a huge success both by way of our internal goals (conversion and engagement) and customer satisfaction.
"I have been playing Prime Music on the tablet all day."
"You get 'free' access to over a million songs via Prime Music. If you already have Amazon Prime, there are very few reasons to buy any other Android tablet over the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9."
"I have been playing Prime Music on the tablet all day."
"You get 'free' access to over a million songs via Prime Music. If you already have Amazon Prime, there are very few reasons to buy any other Android tablet over the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9."
Next Steps & Learnings
Despite our success, we knew there were gaps and areas we wanted to polish even before we launched, so we set out working on those:
Beyond the product improvements we identified, we took time to analyze our process and look ahead towards improving there too. My insights were shared by much of team. Prime Music did not adhere to the “launch and learn” strategy our team valued. It was a year-long development effort before any aspect of it was released to our customers. That caused some negative impacts on morale especially for development when features continuously changed and sometimes got cut despite weeks or months of effort. Going forward we put processes in place to release updates in smaller phases.
- Stations
- Prime Browse
- Clean up left nav
- Full play in store
- Bigger catalog
- Longer playlists
- More moods
- Lean back suggestions
Beyond the product improvements we identified, we took time to analyze our process and look ahead towards improving there too. My insights were shared by much of team. Prime Music did not adhere to the “launch and learn” strategy our team valued. It was a year-long development effort before any aspect of it was released to our customers. That caused some negative impacts on morale especially for development when features continuously changed and sometimes got cut despite weeks or months of effort. Going forward we put processes in place to release updates in smaller phases.