Inline with Prime and Prime Videos coming to Amazon customers in Japan, we decided to update the home page of the PS4 app to align closer to Fire TV and have added carousel based browsing. I worked very closely with our development team based in India and redlined the entire new interface as well as defined text treatments when using Japanese characters and aligning to baselines for a clean and legible app.
Home page with new Amazon Video logo.
Japanese Prime sash I made using translations from the technical writing team.
Browsing most popular movies.
Movie detail page. Interesting note: in Japan on PlayStation, they use the O button for selection and X for going back or dismissing.
I modified the existing on-screen search keyboard to accommodate Hiragana characters and their accents. Whilst typing, customers are offered search entry suggestions in Kanji and Katakana for specific titles. I spent a week in the Amazon Tokyo office user testing and found interesting results. Volunteers were fine with using the keyboard to search for TV shows we suggested, but when told to search for their favorite TV show, most said they were frustrated that they couldn't type using English ABC characters to look for American TV shows. This was more obvious with the younger testers whilst the older were more comfortable typing in Hiragana. So we moved the ABC keyboard option to a more prominent position in the keyboard as opposed to it being a shortcut key at the base of the screen where it was during testing.
Post launch of the Japan PS4 app, considering how simple of a plan it sounded to just modify an existing app to work in another language, the project soon became more complicated than anticipated. Certain devices struggled with embedding a new typeface. But working closely to the development team and working through issues together, we came up with solutions that didn't hinder the user experience.
