Where are the best design teams at Amazon who are actually shipping products and aren’t Alexa.
AWS. You seen that cloud management console bro? Jony Ive my ass.
AWS has a large design team that shipped over 30 products last year. Not consumer-facing stuff, but most of it was still really strong work. Kindle devices has a design group as well. Many designers work with individual teams; each category in the company (e.g., home & garden, home innovations, automotive, various consumables categories, softlines & fashion) often has a dedicated design team that launches new discovery or browsing or buying experiences. The HCD group handles lots of logistical details for “last mile” projects. PrimeNow, deliveries, order tracking, etc.
Considering that AWS is a largely faceless collection of software abstractions, Design does a really alright job making it look like something. Lots of vectors of gears with arrows lol. But as before — it’s a hard thing to design for.
The new AWS design language definitely looks better, but the aesthetics are still secondary. Making that stuff work, and be accessible, and generally designing it such that many people with many different behaviors can achieve a range of goals with it is exceedingly difficult. But even Amazon as a whole isn’t that worried about aesthetics. It is however obsessive about clarity and an experience that enables customers to get done what they want to get done. In that we succeed, wildly at times.
EDG is the place to be a designer at Amazon
What does Engagement Design work on?
I heard they’re experiencing some upheaval right now
Alexa engine design is a fun team
Fun, but mostly useless
You got to be kidding. It’s Alexa Engine team with majority of designers with no experience (or idea) about how voice and multimodal interface works!
EDG works on things like the World Of concept in your beta app, and they also work on Spark.
What does world of do when you choose something? Just curious
CXT for the customer-facing shopping/retail stuff. Lots of research going on there, too.
“Best” and “Amazon” can’t be used in the same sentence.
Who's the best at getting market share in cloud?
Who's the best at getting market share in smart speakers?
Fire devices has a good design team
Could you expand on this? Do they have good design process? Research? What is it about Fire devices team?
Wow not much for Amazon Design here
You’ve seen Amazon right? Not much there but the hubris of some of the designers is amazing. This is a place that takes people from Yahoo and Windows teams and makes them design leaders. And yeah some of the design for AWS is good but most of it is confusing still. Nothing in the Fire devices experiences that compares to Netflix or Apple TV.
It’s too bad, such a powerful platform and product suite, deserves a fresh coat of paint
Amazon has design 😂
<table>Hi, Alexa</table>