Amazon Alexa

MLP Workout Feature

How might Alexa improve the workout experience on a smartwatch?

Core Team: Design, Product, Engineering
Duration: 2020-2023
Product: Classic Alexa on third-party smartwatches

Challenge

Alexa on Fitbit had the greatest organic growth compared to other Alexa-built in devices but high lapse rates, revealing an opportunity to improve the experience of Alexa on smartwatches.

Approach

A customer obsessed design approach, talking and observing what our customers wanted and needed. I conducted the first user interviews in AVS which lead to a total of 7 research studies being conducted throghout my time on the wearables segment. As well as our first comprehensive enthnographic study. A 2 week diary study of 19 participants. In which I created research protocol, synthesized research findings and socialized our learnings.

Solution

Launched Amazon's first wear OS app, a 0-1 product on Fossil Gen 6 smartwatch. Extending Alexa’s capabilities to fitness to support common why-buy of device, workout tracking.

Impact

We transformed wearables into the fastest growing Alexa built-in segment. We scaled our user base fivefold.

My contribution included:

  • Concepting

  • Facilitated research

  • Created research protocol

  • Synthesized research findings

  • Conversation design

  • Documentation

  • Concept Validation Study

  • Synthesized study findings

What did I do?

Guiding Principles

  • Be concise but conversational with fitness stats instead of direct and data-driven

  • Be encouraging, but not opinionated

  • Celebrate a customer’s progress

  • Enable customer choice via customization 

3 Ways We Improved Workouts with Voice

  • Real-time Updates

    During a workout, the voice assistant proactively reads out the customer’s workout stats. While this information is available at a glance on the watch, real-time updates allow the customer to stay focused and aware of their surroundings with a proactive, verbal update.

  • Workout Summary

    Post-workout we introduced workout summaries that are trigged once a customer taps end workout or asks Alexa to end the workout. Included in the summary is an update on goal progress, top stats, and encouragement to acknowledgment the workout logged.

  • Workout Goals

    With Alexa, we wanted to offer weekly goals. The smartwatches do a great job of showing progress toward daily goals, but we saw an opportunity to track the number of workouts or distance covered per week to provide long-term support for achieving health goals.

The Workout Experience

Scenario: Customer goes out for a run and has enabled real-time updates (for distance, current heart rate and motivation) and workout summary (for total distance, duration, average pace, and calories)


Customer: “Start my run”
Alexa: Starting a workout in 3, 2, 1 (earcon+haptic)

< At the 1 mile mark >
Alexa: (earcon) [1] mile completed. Your heart rate is [165] beats per minute. [You got this!]

< At the 2 mile mark >
Alexa: (earcon) [2] miles completed. Heart rate is [154] beats per minute. [Nice job!]

Customer: “End my run” or taps GUI buttons
Alexa: (earcon) [Way to go!] You reached your weekly fitness goal! Your total distance was [2.2] miles. Total workout time [24] minutes, [57] seconds. With an average pace of [8] minutes, [30] seconds. And you burned [215] calories. [Nice work!]

Encouragement

DESIGN HIGHLIGHT

In the research we learned that the majority of customers appreciated encouragement during and after their workouts. After all, Alexa’s personality strives to be clever, relevant, and make our customer smile. To help the experience feel more dynamic, we randomize encouragement to offer variety and created a bank of phrases that aligned with our guiding principles.

Encouragement of course is personal and at this time we don’t have the intelligence to be a personalized coach, so we designed an experience that would celebrate the progress made and feel conversational vs data driven (stats only).


Rules: Use all phrases before repeating a phrase. Always include SSML markup for excitement.

  • Keep it up!

  • Let’s go!

  • Get it!

  • You got this!

  • Great job!

  • Awesome job!

  • Nice work!

  • Way to go!

Bank