Amazon Smart Home

Website
eCommerce
Interaction Design

Introduction

There are over 10,000 smart home products currently on Amazon.

Knowing which ones are safe, secure, reliable, and compatible with one another is a struggle even for the technically-inclined buyer—those looking for their first smart home products don’t have a chance. Reading reviews and following the latest news is time-consuming, and buying these products shouldn’t be a scary prospect.

Given some guidelines set out by the Amazon Smart Home team, we set out to explore and conceptualize a new way to search and buy smart home products without a customer needing to know anything more than what they want to make “smart.”

10k+

Smart home products available on Amazon

100+

Possible combinations of recommended smart home products

5 min

From first question to a purchase-ready cart

Execution

We divided each smart home product by the way a customer thinks about it: where it goes and what it does.

Then, we built a “choose-your-own-adventure” story about the customer’s home: the number of rooms they have, the types of hardware they want to make smarter, and more. Each step may generate additional steps, until the customer reaches an endpoint, at which time we make a recommendation for one or more products. For this exploration, we focused on home security with the intention of expanding further into other areas such as heating & cooling, lighting, and electricity usage.

Choose-your-own-adventure experience guides customers from start to finish
Customers don’t need to know what products they need, only what they want to do
End result is a purchase-ready list of products that can be added to your Amazon cart
Extensible platform that allows additional categories and products to be easily added

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Design Approach

Strong affordances ensure a seamless experience for users of any level, on any screen.

Starting with Amazon’s existing brand guidelines, we developed a design system that leveraged the recognizability of Amazon’s visual language, while applying it in bolder, more contrasted ways. This resulted in a distinctive sub-brand for the Smart Home Wizard that still felt consistent with Amazon’s other digital experiences. As a new vertical, we pushed ourselves to create an experience that felt dynamic and engaging, while minimizing any visual friction with other digital touchpoints.

To support a widespread user base with varying levels of technical proficiency we ensured the use of consistent design patterns, strong affordances to ensure a seamless experience for users of any level, on any screen.