Alexa Widgets

UX Creative Director   |  Made at Amazon Devices, 2021-22

Defining the widget ecosystem that transformed Alexa’s home screen into an interactive and customizable home screen across devices types.

01   Alexa Widgets for Every Occasion

My Role

As UX Director, I led the development and execution of Alexa’s widget system, which introduced glanceable, actionable content to the home screen. This marked Alexa’s first adventure into a touch-forward, personalized home experience.

• Directed UX, visual design, template architecture, and motion language across 6+ viewports, and 16 internal teams.

• Expanded the widgets framework across tablets, and Fire TV experiences.

• Directed the development and delivery of components, templates, and motion framework into the Alexa Design System to ensure scalable, multimodal design.

• Facilitated virtual ideation workshops during Covid with 18 designers from the Echo Show and Fire TV teams to co-create a new visual and motion language for the ambient experience.

• Support Go To Market (GTM) campaign storytelling through providing assets for Echo Show detail pages, promotional campaigns, and 3P skill promotions.

• Oversaw Human Interaction Guideline (HIG) development for the interaction and visual template systems.

The Challenge

Delivering widgets from the Echo Show 5 to a 65" Fire TV QLED display, the device landscape posed a unique challenge: how do we turn passive smart displays into personalized, interactive experiences that adapt to users’ needs?

We needed to:

• Develop a new touch-forward interaction framework on the home screen while maintaining its ambient nature.

• Design a system flexible enough for both first-party and third-party developers.

• Scale a visual and interaction language across devices and screen sizes.

02   Widgets Supported Across 6+ Device Sizes

Driving Design Direction Across Teams

To start building shared ownership across teams, I led a 3-day virtual workshop with 18 designers from different teams and time zones. The goal was to align on a new visual and interaction language tailored to ambient, touch-forward experiences.

Through structured design prompts, live prototyping, and collaborative critiques, we explored how widgets could feel lightweight yet expressive. Widgets remained glanceable, tactile, and visually cohesive across devices. The workshop surfaced shared principles and inspired key elements of the final design language, while also fostering shared alignment and owenrship across teams working in different product spaces.

03  Team Brainstorm Workshop

The Result

• Delivered a Cross-Device Design System: Developed a modular template system that scaled across 50+ skill use cases and multiple device types in the first year.

• New Touch-Forward Patterns: Designed widgets as our first fully interactive, tap-to-engage surface on the home screen, a major step forward in how users navigated and controlled Alexa experiences.

• Personalization at the Forefront: Enabled customers to customize their home screens by pinning the widgets most relevant to them—weather, calendar, smart home controls, and more.

04   Widget Templates

The Impact

This project marked a shift in how users engage with Alexa devices: from voice-only interactions to a hybrid model that includes glanceable, touchable, and customizable surfaces. By designing for both utility and delight, widgets delivered personalization for customers and developers, redefining what an ambient smart display could be.

• A Customer-Loved Feature:  Millions of widget interactions per week across all Echo Show devices and Fire TV Ambient displays.

• Global Reach: The template system was designed to scale, supporting localization across multiple languages and regions.

• Boosted Engagement: Teams and developers that built widgets saw improved engagement, due to higher persistence on the home screen.

• Rapid Widget Growth: From a dozen at launch to over 50+ and growing in the first year, scaling across Alexa-enabled features and skill developers.

• Design System Consistency: Templates, components, and motion tokens became part of the Alexa Design System. This accelerated widget development and maintained consistency across different teams.

• Empowering Developers: The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) was extended to support widgets, empowering developers to connect with customers directly on the home screen.

05   Widgets on the Echo Show 15 & Echo Show 21