My journey at Amazon
Jul. 2022 - present | Enterprise UX & leadership
Amazon Publisher Services is a suite of cloud-based solutions designed specially to empower publishers to build thriving digital media business.
I lead UX design for Advanced TV & Audio team, focusing on enhancing the enterprise experience for advertising products through improvements of information architecture, dashboard design/data viz, deals tool, optimizer tools, innovative new ad formats, and new AI tools to help smarter operations for users.
DELIVERABLES
UX Strategy, User flows, Wireframes, UI, user research/testing, mechanisms/design process
Design work details are accessible upon request due to my NDA. Thank you!
Before joining the APS Advanced TV & Audio team as its first UX designer, I had envisioned several UX improvements necessary to enhance customer experience. It could be a more streamlined workflow and intuitive UI. However, upon joining, I realized a broader scope of challenges lay ahead.
#1 The challenge for design. Challenges ranged from the absence of a structured design process to limited resources and a lack of awareness about the importance of user research and usability testing.
#2 The challenge for team collaboration. Those lies in establishing effective team collaboration practices from scratch, including defining roles, communication channels, and workflows amidst differing perspectives and existing processes.
Despite these obstacles, I embraced the opportunity to shape not only designs but also the foundational principles of UX. My immediate question: who can validate my designs?
What’s the Challenge
Who are my Customers
3rd Party Publishers - End Users
Account Managers, Solutions Architectures - Internal customers
When considering SaaS product design from a UX perspective for both external users and internal customers, the focus is on catering to different user roles and objectives within the same product ecosystem to meet overall business goals. This enables me to navigate the complexities of Enterprise UX workflows effectively.
In APS, I design the publisher facing products to help streaming TV and audio publishers to manage their ads business. I also design internal admin management products for Amazon internal customers efficiently support publishers to manage and integrate advanced technologies.
Enhancing Enterprise UX entails soliciting intuitive and efficient experiences to effectively address challenges and streamline operations.
I've encountered challenges beyond design, Amazon started hiring freeze at the end of 2022 due to macroeconomic conditions that restricts access to tech/UX research resources. Furthermore, finding alternative methods to learn about users within these resource constraints presents a significant obstacle.
As the sole UX, educating team members about UX principles and establishing collaborative workflows has proven challenging. Additionally, our current design tools require upgrading to improve communication efficiencies. Switching tools in large company is a complex process that cannot be achieved with a simple click of a button. I can do more!
More to go
I host the remote meetings mostly for brainstorming, workshop, research session, and usability testing.
Approach
Diving into users is the key. I've fostered close collaboration with colleagues who possess in-depth knowledge of our publishers, enabling us to thoroughly understand user needs. Furthermore, I've implemented usability testing to validate designs directly with publishers, ensuring alignment with their expectations. Despite limited UX resources, I've leveraged compliant AI tools for ideation and UX content writing, optimizing our process and maintaining quality outputs. I had the opportunity to lead UX design for
Overall Information architecture (IA)
Deal tools
New Mathematical Optimizer tools
New ad format
Dashboard Design
Similarly, when addressing internal process challenges, I take a collaborative and feedback-driven approach. I actively engage with stakeholders to gather their insights and perspectives on the existing processes. I then incorporate these valuable insights into my intake process and design roadmap, ensuring that they are reflective of the needs and priorities identified by the stakeholders.
UX principles can extend beyond product design.
What I’ve accomplished
Improved overall experience on both Ads products and internal processes, including
Launched the ATV&A UX design program and created the design process to adeptly support APS product lifecycle. This included implementing a design intake process, creating and managing the design roadmap, conducting design reviews for iterative improvements, bringing Figma/FigJam for enhanced collaboration and seamless handoff to engineering, and introducing a quarterly UX newsletter to keep teams informed about ongoing projects, upcoming initiatives, and to promote awareness of UX design and research directions
Led adoption of Figma tools across APS team with 200+ teammates, educated on best practices, and managed the workspace for consistent, efficient use—significantly improving design workflows, cross-team communication, and handoff to engineering throughout the product lifecycle
Revamped SaaS product IA and authored usability testing report to inform stakeholders' product strategy
Executed X number of features/projects design for over 100 global publishers per year
Y% increase of Customer Satisfaction Rating
User feedback like “The redesigned portal looks good to me - one thing I like is that it's relatively simple“
* Any confidential or sensitive information had been omitted to comply with my NDA.
“Lio’s championed fresh perspectives in user-centric design for APS and brought new tools, frameworks and capabilities to our team”