Amazon Fire TV Recast

Watch free over-the-air live TV channels on Fire TV and on the go.

My Role

Lead Designer

Company

Amazon

Platform

iOS & Android

Scope

0 to 1 product

While connected to an antenna, Fire TV Recast can record and stream free over the air TV to Fire TV, Echo show and mobile devices.

Working as the lead interaction designer on this product, this was an excellent project to go deep into balancing customer obsession and earning trust with your partners. Fire TV Recast had an unusually long development cycle and that allowed me to gain much deeper insights into my customers (in home usability studies!) and how to get things shipped while maintaining a design bar. The experience is also multi-modal: TV, mobile and Alexa devices such as Echos and Echos Shows.

While overlooking all aspects of the product, my main focus was on the mobile app.

Onboarding

There are 4 main CX areas in Fire TV Recast: Mobile Onboarding, Mobile Browse & Management, Fire TV Browse & Management and Alexa VUI CX.

While the browse and VUI CX are simple extensions of well established platform patterns, Mobile Onboarding is very unique. At the time of development, there were only 1 other product in the market that streams Over-the-Air TV to mobile or set-top boxes.

Antenna placement is important to the quality of the programming customer is receiving. However, in an age of cable TV, Youtube and streaming, working with an antenna is no longer common knowledge to most people. Which means in addition to successfully onboarding a headless device, guiding customer to find optimal antenna places is another task we have to achieve in Mobile Onboarding.

Building onboarding prototype in Origami Studio

Iteration

Early on in the process, I prioritized towards giving proper context by displaying channels on a VR overlay. Channel information can be seen on screen as you turn and explore the space around you. Although most customer responded positively to this design, we couldn’t get the accuracy we wanted from lower end smartphones.

I then moved onto version 2 where antenna towers are plotted onto a map and your home is in the center. This design tested very poorly in studies as people either take a long time to understand the map or simply give up.

Going to version 3. By using cardinal and ordinal directions, we removed the requirement to read a map. However, customer still voiced frustrations as they can't seem to find one direction that gives them all the channels they want, therefore adding the amount of time spent in onboarding.

At this point, I had became obvious that people get frustrated when onboarding run long, regardless of whether cause by inferior software of awkward antenna placement. When the speed to get through onboarding is a key success metric, we are setting ourself up to failure by focusing efforts on optimizing a tool that encourages people to explore and cause decision fatigue.

At the end, instead of asking customer to find a satisfactory channel lineup, we just picked a direction with most channels based on customer’s location. The more complicated decision on where to mount the antenna can be made without checking back at the app.

We tested version 1-3 in our research lab. However for version 4, we felt it was important to go into customer’s homes. 5 families were selected in the great Seattle area. I teamed up with one of our researcher and visited all of the families with a Fire TV recast device and high fidelity iOS prototype I built using Origami Studio.

At the end, all 5 customers could speed through the process with minimal confusion on what to do next. To my surprise, most people were able to quickly identify cardinal and ordinal directions in their homes and they were satisfied with the overall onboarding experience.

Fire TV Recast hit the street in November, 2018. The product is currently 4 stars on Amazon. I was able to participate in a brand new hardware product developer from start to finish and I was a rare but excited opportunity. (There were a lot of interested things I learned when designing the mobile and Fire TV browse CX but not as much as designing onboarding.)