Challenge #7: Amazon Personalization

Making the buying experience on Amazon feel less overwhelming

👋 Welcome to the Product Design Challenge: Every few months, you’ll receive a realistic product design challenge to work on your skills, including product thinking, UX design, research, and prototyping. You can use it purely for practice purposes or even as a portfolio case study. If you don’t want to receive the challenge, you can manage your preferences in your account settings.

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Scenario

You are working in the Amazon buyer squad for iOS. You have recently launched an updated design language for the app that is getting positive feedback, but a lot of the feedback you are receiving also revolves around the fact that buying feels overwhelming.

Data

Here are some customer quotes from your latest round of research:

• “I like the new design but it feels like there is so much distraction”.

• “The deals I’m seeing are completely irrelevant”

• “Why do I see movies, light bulbs, and kids toys in the same screen?”

The feedback you are getting is reflected on your product data:

• The search bar has a conversion rate of 22.6%

• The home tab has a conversion rate of 6.2%

Your team’s hypothesis is that this happens because people use the search bar when they have made a decision on what they want, vs. the home tab when they are simply browsing. However, you all believe there is massive room for improvement.

Goal

Find a way to increase to increase the conversion rate from the home tab in the Amazon iOS App by addressing your customer pain points and potentially introducing a more personalized home screen experience.

Some suggested ideas by your stakeholders include:

• Introducing a personalization quiz.

• Restructuring the sections in the homepage to be more relevant.

• Allowing users to customize their home tab.

• Improving your personalization algorithm.

Deliverable

• Define the key metrics for an initiative like that. What data, other than conversion rate, is important to you to better understand the problem and test your solution?

• Come up with a few ideas using sketching techniques such as Crazy 8’s or Concept Sketching.

• Pick your favorite idea, mock it up in Figma, and create a simple, medium-fidelity prototype. You can find various UI examples of Amazon in the Figma community.

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. If you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community, you can share your process and output in the Designary chat.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation.

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition.

• Figma for mockups and prototypes.

This challenge will help you with

• Product sense

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes.