{"id":144,"date":"2017-06-01T20:27:42","date_gmt":"2017-06-01T20:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/portfolio.cherylplatz.com\/?p=144"},"modified":"2022-07-31T01:21:38","modified_gmt":"2022-07-31T01:21:38","slug":"alexa-notifications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/portfolio.cherylplatz.com\/?p=144","title":{"rendered":"Alexa Notifications and Interruption Model"},"content":{"rendered":"

Upon joining the central Alexa Voice Design team in late 2015, my first order of business was to tackle a complicated systems design problem: how could we adapt a primarily single-threaded, voice-forward, reactive experience to allow proactive notifications? There was a great deal of caution surrounding the effort, as our product has been invited into homes, and we did not want to violate that trust.<\/p>\n

Further complicating matters was the as-then-unannounced Echo Show, which completely changed the interaction paradigm. While Echo had not supported large-scale multitasking, the Echo Show introduced the concept of navigation and a sort of back stack. The Notifications patterns were also required for third party Alexa Skills partners, but we had to expose them in a way that prevented abuse of the Alexa system’s trust within the home.<\/p>\n

I drove the design side of this engagement from my start on the Alexa team until my departure in late 2016, with Carl Mekala as my product management partner. The feature was announced in Spring 2017, in tandem with related feature Communications and the release of the Echo Show.<\/p>\n

Defining the problem<\/h1>\n

At first engagement, I was simply asked to help my product management partner define the interactions for a proposed Alexa notification system. There were 5 levels of proposed interruptions at the time, and details about the Messaging feature were only just emerging. We began by defining scenarios for each of the proposed notification types, and I synthesized this information into interaction flows that helped streamline our solution.<\/p>\n

Shortly after we began this engagement, the Echo Show entered the picture as our first graphically enabled Alexa device. This was particularly problematic because Echo devices up until that point did not generally support multitasking. Graphical systems like computers are expected to support a more sophisticated system where two or more tasks can coexist on the screen at once, like timers and browsing. Once those tasks are visible, they must also be accessible via voice.<\/p>\n

An invisible design system<\/h1>\n

I began to identify changes that would be needed to our core interaction patterns to enable this new paradigm. The inputs to my process were an existing Excel spreadsheet that documented the Echo interaction model as shipped, the output of a cross-device design charette from the team working on the Echo Show, and pre-release documentation for tented projects like the Echo Show and the Ford partnership.<\/p>\n

I proceeded to define a cross-platform design pattern library to synthesize the work and patterns required. This work involved several generative design exercises, including:<\/p>\n