Music for Fire TV

In the run up to Fire TV’s launch it became clear the device would also need to support Amazon Music, Prime Music and Prime Stations to give customers access to all their Prime benefits through the device. While still on Amazon Video I was asked to take on the design for the app, due to my prior experience with designing and building television applications.  As the design lead I worked closely with both the Music and Fire TV teams to create a design that would fit within the Fire TV framework, while still being straightforward and intuitive to use for listening music.

I worked on this project for over a year, creating three major releases. The first was playback of music a user had bought on Amazon, or uploaded. The second integrated Prime Music and browsing of Prime Playlists, so a user could play and add new playlists directly on the device. The last release added Prime Stations to the platform, a radio-style service with stations created from the Prime Music catalog for similar artists or genres.

Early Concepts

This project was a complex one to navigate due to the number of stakeholders. This was my first time working on a product involving three different organisations within Amazon. With templates already available for Home and Browse views that I could adapt for Music I focused my early attention on brand new experiences for Now Playing and the Album view. A big challenge I faced was how to turn audio into something that was also visually engaging. Fortunately Amazon Music was one of the first music services to have lyrics available for a large portion of its catalog, so this was the perfect opportunity to put them front and center. It also had a library of artist photos, which were at a high enough resolution to be used as background imagery. Below are a number of the iterations I went through as I tried to find the best way to showcase a user’s music on their TV.

Home

The Music app was designed to fit seamlessly in with the rest of the Fire TV UI, so for the majority of the app design I used pre-existing templates as a starting point, including the home level. One of my goals for the project was to make it as simple as possible to start playing music. A user had access to their full library, but our expectations from user research on listening behaviour was that the majority of people would use a playlist, or recent songs/albums as a jumping in point. Users could also tap the Play/Pause button on the Artists or Albums rows to kick off shuffling their entire music library.

Album and Artist Browse

The horizontal album and artist views allowed for strong visuals for artist imagery and album covers, along with details and secondary actions below the item in focus. However the size of each tile and speed of scrolling on the Fire TV meant that a new way of quickly jumping through long lists had to be implemented.In the area just below the title I added a simple alphabet navigation, allowing quick jumping between each letter and greatly reducing the amount of effort needed to browse to the end of the list.

Album View

The album view was a brand new layout for the device and went through a number of iterations. The final design has the album artwork on the right side, along with action buttons that relate to the whole album. This separation from the songs allowed the actions and imagery to stay fixed while scrolling the list. As the song list is scrolled the title stays locked to the top of the screen, with songs fading out so as not to overlap.

Now Playing

With the Now Playing experience I wanted to create something that would feel immersive and engaging. I used background artist imagery and song lyrics to create a unique layout for the app, helping it stand out from other music applications. With Amazon Music you could use lyrics to jump through a song. Pressing up or down on the remote would start navigating, then tapping select would jump to that point in the music. This made it the perfect karaoke experience, giving customer's music a whole new dimension.

If the user hit the menu button they would see a set of actions that related to the currently playing song, as well as options to shuffle or repeat the current album or playlist. Basic song control was handled by the play and skip buttons on the remote, if the user wanted to go back to the full song list they would select ‘View Album’ or ‘View Playlist’.

The motion demo below is one I created to show the developer and product teams my desired implementation for lyrics and background images. I wanted it to feel fluid and exciting, but also make sure it was relaxing and wouldn't distract customers who just wanted to use the app to play music in the background.

Prime Playlists

The second release of the app gave users the option to browse the Prime Music library of playlists. Hand curated by Amazon Music this collection of hundreds of playlists covered all types of music tastes and styles. Customers could browse through a number of general lists to find playlists of interest, as well as recommendations based on their own music library. These lists were placed below the customer's own music library, making sure not to disrupt their own personal collection.

Prime Stations

The final release for the app was the addition of Prime stations. Working like a radio station, these would pull songs from similar artists or a specific genre. Users could bring up the UI when playing the station and like or dislike a song to fine tune the station to their specific taste, and could skip forward and back as many times as they liked.

Splash Pages

At each major update to the application a splash page was shown to notify users of what new features had been added to the application. Working with the music team on the correct copy I used their style guides and stock photography assets to create visually striking pages that would feel engaging, more than just a dialog box on screen explaining what was new.

Results & Learnings

In the three month period after launch of the app around 9% of Fire TV users had played music for at least 5 mins. When Prime Music launched this jumped up to 15%, then 16% for Prime Stations. The Fire TV was overwhelming purchased by Prime users, which was great for Music as it meant the majority of users would have music available to play, as can be seen in the increased usage. 19% of the Prime users were brand new to Prime Music. At launch 89% of users who entered a browse list got to playback. This dropped to 85%, then 83% in the two subsequent Prime Music releases, which was attributed to users browsing the new music library.

Product feedback after launch was incredibly valuable in helping finesse the design over the next major releases, such as the updated playlist layout for Prime Playlists. Being able to have users provide feedback after prolonged sessions with the device at home gave me a much more comprehensive understanding of what worked and what didn’t as we continued to iterate on the design. Features that we as a team thought were exciting, such as the lyrics, also resonated with customers, as seen in some of the reviews left on Amazon.com for the Fire TV. This was great validation that we had focused on the right things to make a fun, engaging way to enjoy your music in the living room.

‍”I've been going nuts lately with prime music streaming. It a blast just reading the lyrics from these song, or even singing along to them on the Fire TV.” - Syn N.

“I really enjoy having all my Amazon music available to listen to with a click of the remote. The interface is very fluid.” - Wilder Raven