Product Amazon Fire TV is a set top box in the Kindle product family. It’s objective is to provide a content-forward, family-friendly experience that quickly and easily brings a huge library of content to the television screen.

Responsibilities As a design intern, I spent half my time providing general design support for the 10-person UX Design team, and half my time completing two larger intern projects.

Design support meant helping with whichever deadline was tightest. Tasks ranged from brainstorming original graphics to polishing and refining pixel-perfect assets for delivery, and working with engineers to file and fix design bugs on the build. I also worked on a typography exploration, refined layouts while working with project managers and interaction designers, conducted a brief user study, created spec/red-line documents for engineers, and kept presentation decks up to date.

My Projects My first intern project, spanning three months, involved a design proposal for a potential new product feature. For the second project, spanning another three months, I was responsible for the design of the SDK Sample App for third party developers and for creating the UX Design Guidelines for the Amazon Fire TV. Unfortunately, the first project is still under NDA.

The Sample App and Design Guidelines were a large task. For the Sample App it was my responsibility to make sure the App demonstrated the Amazon Fire TV interface, provided code for key functionalities, and illustrated good user design principles for the 10 foot experience. I was in charge of the overall structure of the App, working closely with engineers to ensure that necessary functionality was included, and designing a suite of original graphics to replace the Amazon branded graphics in the system.

Creating the UX Design Guidelines involved describing the Amazon Fire TV interface, the design tools available to third-party developers, and best practices for the 10 foot experience in general, which was aimed towards developers and designers who were used to building mobile touchscreen experiences. In consultation with other designers on the team, I wrote and organized all content, and created the necessary illustrations and graphics.