Prime Gaming 🎮
Context and Challenge
As one of the earliest team members of a new Prime businesses called "Twitch Prime," I designed and simplified a complex ecosystem of gaming-related benefits within Amazon Prime. These benefits spanned across Amazon.com, Twitch.tv, and various in-game experiences, creating a fragmented and often confusing user experience for Prime members. The challenge was to create a cohesive, understandable, and trustworthy experience that would maximize the value of Prime Gaming benefits for users.
Key Design Challenges:
- Fragmentation: Benefits were spread across multiple platforms (Amazon.com, Twitch.tv, various in-game experiences, and the Amazon Games Windows app).
- Complexity: Prime customers already receeve over 30 different Prime benefits, however, only recall a 4-7 at any given time. Gaming-specific benefits including Free Games, Twitch subscriptions, and rotating in-game items were new to customers and needed to be introduced and explained.
- User Confusion: Lack of a central "home" for gaming benefits led to trust issues and underutilization of benefits by loyal customers.
- Consistency: Need to create a unified experience across diverse platforms and game titles.
Evolution of gaming.amazon.com
Key Challenges in UX Leadership as we evolved to Prime Gaming
As the UX leader for Prime Gaming, I faced a complex set of challenges that went beyond typical design problems. These challenges required strategic thinking, organizational leadership, and the ability to navigate ambiguity in a rapidly evolving business landscape.
Resource Constraints in a New Business:
- Limited budget and headcount allocated to a nascent business unit.
- Competing priorities with established Amazon teams for engineering and design resources.
- Primary Focus: Maximizimg impact with limited resources while building a case for additional investment.
Lack of Established User Feedback Channels:
- No existing mechanisms for gathering regular user feedback specific to Prime Gaming.
- Limited access to Amazon's broader user research infrastructure.
- Primary Focus: Establishing cost-effective methods to gather and integrate user insights into the design process.
Building and Leading a New Team:
- Recruiting and onboarding team members in a competitive talent market
- Developing team culture and processes from the ground up.
- Primary Focus: Building a high-performing team while simultaneously delivering on business objectives.
Navigating Organizational Complexity:
- Coordinating with multiple stakeholders - all will big resumes and bigger egos - across Amazon Prime, Twitch, and game development teams.
- Aligning diverse business goals and technical constraints with user needs.
- Primary Focus: Fostering collaboration and driving consensus across different organizational units.
Rapid Business Evolution:
- Frequent pivots and changing priorities as the business model evolved and new gaming benefits were invented and experimented with.
- Pressure to deliver results quickly in a fast-moving market.
- Primary Focus: Maintaining a consistent user experience while adapting to shifting business strategies.
Bridging Business Goals and User Needs:
- Balancing pressure for short-term metrics with long-term user satisfaction.
- Educating stakeholders through action and results on the value of user-centered design in a metrics-driven culture.
- Primary Focus: Rapidly iterating based on user needs which demonstrating tangible business impact by driving metrics that mattered (sign up).
Managing Design Consistency at Scale:
- Ensuring design coherence across a growing number of touchpoints and partnerships.
- Coordinating with external game developers who had their own established design languages.
- Primary Focus: Developed a scalable design system and guidelines that could be adopted across diverse teams.
Integrating User Feedback in a Learning Organization:
- Teaching the team how to effectively gather and interpret user feedback on a rotating basis.
- Developing processes to translate user insights into actionable design and business decisions.
- Primary Focus: Fostering a culture of continuous learning and user-centric thinking across the organization with mechanisms like the UX Papercut program, Office Hours, and quarterly UX State of the Union newsletters
Setting a big vision
Driving the team in unison required a big design vision of what the ideal place for Prime members who love video games would look and feel like. My team and I developed 2 prototypes throughout the course of the evolution of the business. As we learned more about our customer needs and our business evolved, so did our vision of future.
Prototype 1: Twitch Prime HQ | Prototype 2: Optimus | Live today: gaming.amazon.com
Measuring UX Impact
In addition to a broad vision for the future, I recognized the need for robust, quantifiable data to guide our decision-making process and show impact across the board. To this end, my team and I developed and implemented the annual "Sentiment and Attitudes" survey—a powerful tool that became instrumental in shaping our UX strategy and product roadmap.
This statistically significant survey went beyond traditional metrics, measuring not only customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS), but also diving deep into system usability (SUS) and user preferences for specific Prime Gaming benefits. By combining these insights with broader Prime member profiles and market research, we created a comprehensive framework for understanding our users' needs, behaviors, and motivations.
Quantitative User Sentiment Analysis:
- Developed and implemented an annual "Sentiment and Attitudes" survey.
- Measured key metrics including Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and System Usability Scale (SUS).
- Gathered data on user preferences by having customers rank Prime Gaming benefits.
- Utilized statistical analysis to ensure significance of survey results.
Comprehensive User Profiling:
- Integrated survey results with market research and Prime team data on shopping behaviors.
- Created holistic, data-driven user profiles (personas) combining gaming preferences with broader Prime member characteristics.
Data-Driven Decision Making:
- Utilized annual "Sentiment and Attitudes" survey results to inform product roadmap.
- Prioritized feature development and design iterations based on quantitative user feedback.
- Tracked year-over-year changes in CSAT, NPS, and SUS to measure impact of new designs and features.
User-Centric Benefit Optimization:
- Analyzed user rankings of Prime Gaming benefits to guide resource allocation and feature emphasis.
- Tailored user experience to align with identified preferences and behaviors.
Lessons Learned and Future Directions
The value of combining quantitative survey data with qualitative user research for a comprehensive understanding of user needs and preferences cannot be understated.
The importance of regular, structured feedback collection in rapidly evolving digital products is the lifeblood of a big vision transformation.
The potential for cross-functional data integration (e.g., gaming preferences with shopping behaviors) to inform more nuanced user experiences is the engine underlying the big design vision.
Future plans included refining the survey methodology to capture more granular user segments, exploring real-time sentiment analysis tools, and developing predictive models to anticipate shifts in user preferences and behaviors.
Expanding Discovery
Once our product's transformation was nearing completion, we looked to expand our discoverability across Amazon.
This piece of the puzzle is a years-long vision that requires buy-in and partnerships across dozens of teams at Amazon. Prime gaming is still working on this integration today. Amazon Luna, the games streaming team, was one of the first successful cross-org partnerships and is still ongoing today.
