Helping people reach their inner circle, hands-free

Design lead shaping ambient communication experiences for Alexa Connections

I owned the core communication preferences and growth journeys across smart home devices, mobile, and voice—unifying calling, messaging, email, announcements, and drop-in features. This foundational architecture enabled 7 teams to scale features that boost customer acquisition, improve daily retention, and keep household connections effortless.

Context

Staying in touch shouldn’t take effort — but on Alexa, it did.

Individual contributions to the below work-streams, 2021–2025, Alexa Connections

Programs I spearheaded, shaped, and shipped

01 — Awareness & getting started

Goal — Close the gap between what Alexa does and what customers knows
CXO — As a customer I want to be able to know who I can connect to and how
Lunched — Alexa+ SetUp for 6 features, Discovery, Intelligent Preferences & Privacy Layer

02 — Initiating connection

Goal — Help customers co-ordinate and get things done — together
CXO — As a customer I want to reach my home or get someone's attention with speed & confidence
Lunched — Top Contacts Model, Home & Widget Experience on Devices, App, Voice

03 — Meaningful engagement

Goal — Make it natural for customers to discover new ways to connect
CXO — I can show someone I'm thinking of them — effortlessly, when a moment matters
Lunched — Birthdays & Occasions, Active Status, Sharing to Contacts, Daily Message Briefing

PILLAR 01 — Awareness & Getting Started

Uncovering the true customer value proposition with 6 teams together

While ambient devices offer powerful tools like Drop In and Announcements, customers struggled to understand when and how to use them. To solve this, I worked closely with individual feature product owners and studied daily family routines to reshape the initial setup around real household habits, using everyday language to make the product's true value instantly clear.

The strategy —
Getting started with home first & making Top Contacts a communal hub experience

I led the "Top Contacts" program to define what constitutes inner circle for our customers communication circle. Through this initiative, I introduced a dedicated household contacts layer at the very top of the hierarchy—a foundational concept that was previously missing from the ecosystem.

The previous setup was cluttered with too many overlapping contact groups—Favorite, Recent, and Suggested—which confused users. Compounding this, iOS restrictions blocked the backend from reading phonebooks, causing the suggested contacts model to fail completely and stalling the onboarding funnel.

An intuitive cross-device handoff —
Setting up on mobile to bring the home display to life instantly

How people are related determines how we reach them

I pushed to remove manual channel setup and default each contact to the right channel based on relationship, trust, and availability.

My hypothesis, later validated with data

Household members are reached on mobile, since a call usually means they’re away from home

Top Contacts Preference Model I shaped

When you ask Alexa to reach someone, this is the order it tries.

Result

Customers added more Top Contacts when the channel is picked for them, because there are fewer steps

Proposing Low-Effort Designs for Big Wins

Helping seniors onboard along the way so everyone gets started

Right contact, remembered privately

Keeping connections safe as your top contact circle grows

Async messages on shared devices must know who’s speaking. I weighed PIN, face, and Voice ID, aligned privacy, security, and engineering on Voice ID, and navigated the end-to-end flow for drafting messages and emails.

Setup Continues

Moving beyond the home and introducing new channels with Alexa+

With Alexa+ and LLMs, I led design for sending Emails to Contacts, Sharing files with Alexa, and BluetoothTexting along with Calling, Drop In, and Calendar setup that already existed.

Five features and no strategy for how or when customers should set them up.

The team’s hypothesis:

By providing maximum value to customers, they are more likely to "set up" or sign up for a service

Customers couldn’t tell
what each request was asking of them, so every screen took more thought, not less.

More concepts meant slower decisions. (Hick’s Law)

I was the only designer on setup, so I did the design, moderated on-site research, and the case to product.

Solution

I worked with the central Alexa+ onboarding team to give Alexa Connections customers a place in first-time onboarding.
Email and Calendar stayed together, since customers saw one thing. Share with Alexa via email got its own path. Texting moved to when customers need it.

PILLAR 02 — Initiating connection

I led interaction design across home, widgets, and the app, building a glanceable, one-tap connect system around how customers want to reach their people, scaling it from 21- 5 inch hubs through adaptive hierarchy and density.

PILLAR 03 — Meaningful engagement