Redesigning Help on Fire TV
UX Design
Based on several years of User Research, the Amazon Customer Service team focusing on Customer Service for Devices and Digital Services has learned of several categories of Customer behaviors when they encounter problems with digital products. While there are some Customers who desire human assistance at the first sign of an issue, most Customers are interested in attempting to troubleshoot their problem before reaching out to Customer Service for help.
After looking over examples of Customer contacts where Customers attempted to solve issues on their own, we noticed a trend concerning more Customers reaching out for help with the Fire TV product family compared to other devices and digital services. Diving deeper into this experience, I performed a heuristic review of how Amazon presented Troubleshooting self-help within the Help section of Digital Experience menus across the portfolio (Fire TV, Tablet, eReader, Prime Video and Alexa apps on mobile devices, etc).
It became readily apparent that the Help Menu for the Fire TV operating system was not designed with TV remote interactions in mind. Given the user's posture in relation to a TV, this interaction space presents unique challenges due to how the interaction is separated from the controls (as opposed to a touch screen) and challenges in consuming long-form content (reading several paragraphs across your living room is an uncomfortable experience).
The Fire TV Help Navigation had several issues.
First, the reuse of a standard three-column page layout made discovery of content a challenge. This three-column page layout is standard for other Settings menu pages and was applied to this Content-heavy experience without much consideration. The fact that the screen is separated into three columns also creates issues with how much space is left for the actual text instructions to be presented.
Second, while some troubleshooting content had video guides, the videos and text were separated into two different sections of Help. Customers have personal preferences on following text instructions or videos based on how comfortable they are with technology or the issue at hand. By separating video from text, Customers became frustrated and could not easily switch between formats based on their issue at hand.
Third, there was a clear disconnect between self-help instructions and how to ask for further assistance. Customers were expected to leave their TV experience entirely and go online to find Customer Service on the shopping website if their attempts at troubleshooting the problem themselves failed.
Lastly, there are clear usability issues with reading longer text on the TV screen. Many of the text-based guides are step-by-step instructions meant to be performed on the TV itself. This meant that a Customer needed to read the instructions from across a room, memorize the steps, then navigate away from the article to attempt the troubleshooting instructions.
Based on these discoveries, I reframed the challenge into a few key experiences to improve.
One - Discovery and Navigation
Customers don't always know how to articulate the issues their facing, and most of the time do not know or care to learn internal jargon used to describe their problem. This means that Customers need an easier browsing experience to find related articles to their issue quickly.
Two - Consumption of the Content
The existing Operating System Page Templates did not cover this unique use case of reading articles or content since that's not normally a behavior Customers engage with on TV screens. I needed to collaborate with the Fire TV Design System team to work within their brand guidance to address this problem. Additionally, this new page needed the ability to read and also view video content at the same time so a Customer can easily switch between formats based on preference.
Three- Using Content while troubleshooting
There's discomfort with remembering what steps to take and then navigating away from the troubleshooting article to attempt the fix. Customers need this content to be more "portable" so that they can follow step-by-step instructions easily.
When designing a prototyped experience for the new design to test, my User Researcher and I recognized a significant problem with fidelity. We were still under COVID protocols and could not bring Customers into our lab physically. Since a critical piece of this experience is the physical posture of navigating a TV with a remote and moving content from a TV screen to a mobile phone, I needed to create some proxy of this separation of control within my Figma prototype.
I did this by designing a simulated remote that the Customer clicked on so that they felt how this was different from direct manipulation (like on a touch screen). I also worked to generate real working QR codes that the Customer could scan during the study to feel how bringing an article from the TV to their personal mobile device would work in the real world. The User Researcher conducting the study noted afterwards that these efforts to bridge the fidelity gap helped significantly to remove noise from the study.
After working to get this new Fire TV Help Experience approved and launched on the Fire TV Operating System, I provided some clear guidance and learnings about the Information Architecture of Self-Help Troubleshooting and considerations for other digital products in Amazon's portfolio.
This guidance included notes about technical and UX differences between platforms (ex. the difference between content delivery on an Echo Show vs a Kindle eReader vs a Prime Video app on an Android phone).
Despite the differences in Visual Design and Design Systems across these products, there were clear ways we could strive for consistency in how Customers navigate Help and find what they need.
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