VOICE PLATFORMS DESIGNER, APR 2019 - DEC 2020
As the first product designer at NPR hired to focus on voice platforms, I led the design to get our flagship morning news program Morning Edition to play on-demand on Amazon Alexa.
To kick things off, I held a workshop with devs and the product manager to draft use cases in Trello (below.) We also sketched out scenarios together, catching technical edge cases.
I conducted usability testing with a "Wizard of Oz" prototype in which I had participants talk to an Alexa device, but I played back pre-recorded audio responses from my laptop. The study results helped clarify our concerns about how and when to announce breaking news and what to do after the 60-minute show ended.
The final output was a diagram I made in Confluence, where developers kept (and heavily referenced) build documentation.
Sunsetting a feature
Most importantly, when the decision was made to sunset the project, I was a part of that too. I crafted a user-focused strategy for sunsetting work that I presented at the 2021 Button Conference for content designers (excerpt of slides shown.)
Our digital team has since applied this approach to other projects as a useful checklist to remember each piece of a sunset process. Ending something kindly and clearly is just as important as launching the next new thing.