Amazon Photos

With Amazon Video gaining a strong foothold in the living room through our Smart TV and Console applications there was an opportunity to bring Amazon’s other services, such as photos and music, into the experience. Integrating Amazon Photos was the first step in turning the Video app into a single destination for Amazon customers in their living room.The Photos app would leverage some of the existing UI templates that were previously designed for video, but also need brand new ones for showing a user’s photos and personal videos. My goal with the application was to make showing off your photos to friends and family a simple, enjoyable, and immersive experience.

First Time User Experience

For splash screens, sign-up, and sign-in screens I used full screen imagery for backgrounds. The Amazon Photos team had a large selection of high quality stock photos available for use, which helped show the users just how great still pictures can look on a large screen.

The number of users of Cloud Drive & Amazon Photos was smaller than the Video service, so I wanted to make sure the landing page for new users was enticing, and offered a simple way to get started. To make the most of the service users would need to bring their photo library from their computer, or more likely their phone. The text and email buttons gave simple routes to move the user journey to these other devices and finish the sign-up process there, as well as push the user to start uploading photos. As they built up their library the TV app would refresh and their photos and albums would appear on screen.

Home

The home level was optimised for quickly getting into playback of photo albums. I reused the template for Amazon Video’s home experience - the double row meant it was straightforward to display and navigate a large amount of content. The first two larger tiles were for all photos and videos, followed by small tiles for each of the user’s albums. Selecting any of these would enter into the slideshow experience. At the end of the list was an ‘Add Photos’ tile, which took users to a full page layout with guidance on Amazon Photo’s other apps for Web and Mobile that could be used for uploading content.

Slideshow

The slideshow experience was where I invested the majority of my time during the project. Not only would it be used for displaying photos, but it was also how customers would browse their albums. By combining the two into a single experience it reduced the time to get photos filling the TV screen, my primary goal when designing the application. To help get sign off, and do user testing on the UI, I created a motion demo using Keynote to run through the primary use cases for the slideshow mode.

VIDEO

The combining of the two navigation systems worked well, and I was happy that most people didn't see the need to bring up the UI unless they were actively hunting for a specific photo. Using left and right on the remote would move through photos without bringing up the UI, keeping chrome from obscuring the customer’s images.

Privacy Settings

A big focus during the product design phase of the app was on customer privacy. We knew that a number of users would likely not want their photos available on a screen that everyone in their household has access to. The majority of Amazon Photos users had the app installed on their phones, syncing any photo they took on the device, not just a few holiday albums.

The project manager and I explored a number of different options to help alleviate this problem. We ultimately decided we needed a confirmation step of password entry before displaying photos application behind a sign in screen. Having this speed bump would unfortunately decrease the number of users who would test out the app, but we felt it was important to establish trust with our customers out of the gate.