Alexa Announcements Redesign

Amazon Alexa is a virtual assistant that lives within Amazon’s smart home device line. With the launch of Alexa+, the Alexa experience aims to be more natural, conversational, and powered by generative AI.

Announcements is a feature within Alexa Communications valued for efficient household communication, broadcasting messages across all Alexa devices in a household and substituting the need to yell across the house.

This redesign focused on catering the Announcement experience to diverse family communication needs, implementing new features that implement both productivity and fun to be more useful for a wider variety of use cases and increase engagement.

Current state prior to redesign pictured above.

Duration
Jun. 2025 - Aug. 2025 (12 weeks)
Role 
UX Design intern

This project is under NDA. Below is a high-level summary of my experience.

Please contact me for more details about my work at ascabrera25@gmail.com

Tools
Figma, Dscout

The Process

Over the course of my internship, my work there were a few key steps to my process:

At the start of my internship, I worked with researchers to understand what work had been done for the discovery phase prior to defining the opportunity, goal, and scope of my project.

The vast majority of my work went into the development phase with 6+ rounds of iterations across the Echo Show and mobile app designs based on brainstorming sessions, user research tests and studies, critiques, presentations, and general idea exploration.

Finally, I presented my final deliverables to the project stakeholders and other team members, showcasing the design process, final deliverables of eight end-to-end prototypes for two main use cases across voice and touch, on Echo Shows, Echo speaker-only devices, and mobile, and future actions and considerations to move the project forward.

01

Define

The Opportunity

Previous data showed an increase in engagement with Announcements when mobile sound effects and avatars for specific messages launched.

Seeing the success of these additional features, there was potential to address a wider variety of household communication needs by expanding the users’ ability to communicate dynamically through greater interactive capabilities, increasing engagement and utility.

The Goal

This redesign aimed to encourage personalized, dynamic communication while maintaining the efficiency and simplicity of Announcements.

Guiding Questions

  1. How can Announcements be more engaging for both fun and productive communication?

  2. How can we educate and encourage users to use new features?

  3. How can we maintain the lightness of the experience?

02

Develop

I hosted a team brainstorming session to start the exploration phase, providing context on how I’ve defined this project and gathering input on three How Might We questions derived from preliminary research.

These ideas served as the foundation of my redesign and started the exploration process.

I collaborated with UX research seeking feedback on prototypes through a user feedback study conducted by the research team and usability testing conducted myself.

I presented my progress throughout my internship in critiques, gathering new perspectives from fresh eyes on the project. These critiques opened up new possibilities and tied my work in with what’s going on with Alexa as a whole.

All of this feedback led to 6+ rounds of iteration across the multimodal Echo Show and Alexa mobile app designs and ultimately helped narrow down my direction presented in my final deliverables.

Explorations

Experimenting with different concepts, iterating, and gathering feedback

03

Deliver

The Outcome

My final deliverables included:

04

Reflection

Reflection

view next project → 
Designing with the conversation Layer in Mind

Designing for Alexa added different layers that I had to consider. Unlike previous projects that relied primarily on touch and the assumption that the user was directly interacting with a screen, I had to consider interactions in which the user was far away from their device, how Alexa would respond verbally to users’ verbal commands and questions, and how to approach the experience for devices without a screen. I had to consider different assumptions and cases than in my past projects, but this project widened my skillset and detailed design-thinking.

COnsidering Project Stakeholders — Product & Engineering

Throughout my project, I met with my product manager and the engineering manager handing the Announcements feature to better understand how this redesign fits into the larger scope of Alexa+ and learn about the technical limitations. Since this product is working towards launch, I learned how to communicate my perspective as a designer to stakeholders outside of the design world as well as taking in perspectives that affect the product.

The Importance of Storytelling

With such a heavy project, it was important in my deliverables to make all the work as digestible as possible while also showing the customer value of my work. Storytelling was key in framing the user-centered design in my prototypes.