I am the interaction designer for the home experience on Amazon Fire TV. I worked with a visual designer, production designer, motion designer/prototyper, design manager, product managers, engineers, executive leaders and countless teams within Amazon in order to align the Amazon digital content categories into Amazon's first in house 10' digital experience.

 

Amazon Fire TV launched on April 2, 2014. Check out the Amazon Fire TV on Amazon today.

Amazon Fire TV brings together digital experiences such as Amazon video (movies and tv), games, apps, photos, and music, as well as third party applications such as Netflix, Hulu and Pandora.

 

One of the initial steps of the design process was to categorize each content category and create a structural framework that would be flexible to support the digital services.

Once the basic information architecture was settled, it was time to sketch out different interactive ways that customers can navigate them. I created a series of sketches and white board brainstorms of different layouts.

Each structural layout was organized into a spacial layout of the entire system from home screens to lists to detail screens. These spacial layouts enabled the team to see the whole system at once and served as a way to ground our conversations and debates about how content should be organized.

I used keynote to animate wireframes. Since this is an interactive, 5-way remote enabled experience, it became important to prototype full flows in rudimentary motion in order to get an idea of how it would work. The goal was to ensure that the flow between home screens to lists to detail pages would make sense and enable customers to achieve their goals of consuming content.

This is a deck of interactive engineering specifications to communicate the interactive parts of the experience. It then became a continual back and forth conversation in order to get the product to where it is today. 

The home screens went through various visual and interactive re-designs. We sweated the details regarding what would happen when each content tile is selected, how each content tile would look, what buttons should be shown beneath, and how we can get tiles from each category type (video, apps, games, etc) to align and look consistent. The following is what we ended up shipping for version 1 on April 2, 2014.