Envisioning a north-star customer experience for the Amazon India shopping

The problem

The year 2019 at Amazon India, began with long-range planning activities. A top-of-mind issue that product leadership was grappling with, was the ever-expanding bouquet of programs and services Amazon was introducing in India. The Amazon app was no longer just a retail shopping destination. Amazon customers were now paying their utility bills using Amazon Pay, booking flight tickets, scanning and paying at merchant outlets, ordering food and groceries etc. With so much to do on Amazon, customers were finding it difficult to navigate from one kind of activity to another. The Discovery of product offerings and switching from one context to the next was becoming hard. The existing navigation system like the hamburger menu, the tabbed navigation bar on top of the screen etc. was falling short in addressing this customer pain point. We saw this as an opportunity to explore possibilities and create an end-state vision of what a brand-new Amazon app will look like. We assumed that customers needed to be able to switch contexts seamlessly as they aimed to perform shopping as well as non-shopping tasks across Amazon.

Users & audience

All existing Amazon shoppers in India.

Team & role

Led a 3-member team of designers to run this initiative as a way to re-think the Amazon shopping-centric app as more of a lifestyle app. This effort ran in parallel to the initiative undertaken by the design systems team in Seattle, USA to redesign the mobile navigation. Our project was partly to influence the Seattle teams to accommodate use cases unique to India as they redesigned the mobile navigation system.

Design process & insights

The project code-named AmazonUno was a design-driven exploratory effort partly to address known shopper frustrations around navigation and context-switching but more importantly to re-think the nature and purpose of the Amazon retail app. We saw limitations of the new bottom tabs mobile navigation system under development in Seattle to address use cases unique to India. Since this was going to be a universal pattern, we had no choice but to adopt it as is. The idea of AmazonUno emerged from a top-down mandate from the India product leadership to influence how the design paradigm for the UI evolved. Design, research, product and category teams got together to essentially answer the question;

How might we make Amazon a digital lifestyle companion for our customers that would support their daily habits, constantly adapt, transform and stay relevant as their habits evolve?

To understand how different kinds of activities fitted into the lives of Amazon shoppers, we wrote down stories around established Amazon shopper profiles. These storyboards would reveal to us touch-points, where and how Amazon could support specific lifestyle choices our customers made on a day-to-day basis.

Design solution

From the storyboards, we distilled a set of common touch-points that acted as ingresses into different contexts that the customer encountered within the Amazon ecosystem as she went about her daily life. We called these AmazonUno signposts. These included the home screen, homepage, feed, profile page and navigation system. The shopping context was no longer primary as it is today.

We created a global homepage with ingresses into different activities a customer might discover and want to indulge in. It could be personalised based on aggregated activities across the app. The navigation defaulted to global actions like Home, Profile and Feed. Explore provided a quick way to switch contexts from anywhere in the app. Once the customer landed into a specific context, like “Book tickets”, the bottom tabs navigation became contextual. Profile became the central pivot where a customer could view and manage all their activities.

Outcome & learnings

AmazonUno being an exploratory design effort, the output from this exercise served two specific purposes; provide product leadership with a vision of what an aspirational customer experience could look like for Amazon customers in India. Secondly, and more importantly, it influenced designers to adopt a more holistic way of thinking as well as a design language for all future work.