The first task I was given at Amazon was designing additional help pages for the recently launched Amazon Video and LOVEFiLM apps on the PlayStation 3. After a year of small design fixes and adding new features to the app, I was tasked with a designing a new yet familiar feeling app for the upcoming Playstation 4 launch. I didn't have a great deal of developers bandwidth so no drastic changes and sticking as close to the existing template as possible whilst also future proofing it for upcoming features.
The Amazon Video app launched without any issues on the same night as the official PS4 device launch. Whilst we did go out immediately to millions of customers and great things were said about the new look and feel, many of my indented ideas had to be dropped. One of which was utilizing the huge collection the merchandise team had of 1080p 'hero' shots which I used as gentle background images based on what would be in focus. Whilst lower end devices would struggle with this, I wanted customers to feel like they were using a much more powerful and modern device. It was a safe bet to leave it out for launch as our QA team simply didn’t have the time to thoroughly check the feature before launch. Although the Xbox 360 app was able to include this feature.
Home page with the original tile based layout. Future proofed for the additions of the now live Amazon Music and Cloud Drive features. At the time of this mockup there was very little to go off of what these features would look like so I simply assumed how we would bring forward the customer’s content to the home page using the same treatment for their other collections, like their video library.
Browse page. IMDb ratings added in addition to the Amazon ratings. In user testing this proves to be a bennifit for customers when deciding on purchasing a title or not.
Movie detail page. Originally the callout to customers regarding ownership status of the title was a bright green bar that ran the width of the screen between the sub navigation and the movie cover. This forced everything below down by around 20px. I thought this looked messy and over embesised someting the customer most likely already knew. Instead I introduced the same green 'Watch Now' we used on the website and added a longer messaging placement above the buttons for calling out rental status which was a longer more complicated statud to callout.
While it was disappointing most of my ideas didn’t make it to the launch date, this was my opportunity to show I could own a product and add a fully launched app to my achievements. The majority of the UX ideas did later make their way into other Amazon Video apps.
