Alexa+ Onboarding & discovery

A cross-platform onboarding experience to help customers meet the new Alexa and set up key features.

The Challenge

Amazon launched Alexa+ in spring 2025, a generative-AI powered evolution of Alexa with more natural conversations, contextual awareness, and personalized capabilities. This marked one of the biggest transformations in Alexa’s history—and millions of customers would meet the new Alexa for the first time through onboarding.

We needed to design a cross-platform onboarding and discovery journey that explained what was new, built trust immediately, and helped customers unlock meaningful value from day one. The experience had to be conversational, concise, and cohesive across Echo devices, the Alexa app, Fire TV, and web, despite evolving product vision, platform capabilities, and design systems.

My Role

As the lead conversational UX designer, I shaped the first conversation customers have with Alexa+ and influenced the end-to-end onboarding strategy across devices. I worked closely with principal PMs, a senior product designer, a UX researcher, engineers, and 5 core domain teams within the Alexa organization.

My responsibilities included

  • Defining the conversational experience across multiple endpoints including devices, smart speakers, web, TV, and app.

  • Participating in design reviews, UX research planning, and content writing workshops to ensure alignment on direction and style

  • Presenting to Directors, VPs, and SVPs to drive clarity and alignment across a rapidly evolving organization and five unique feature domain teams

 
 

Process

The onboarding experience needed to introduce new AI features, align to the new design systems, and impress customers with updated conversation models all at once. To deliver a cohesive and delightful experience I focused on these critical areas:

Creating a Unified, Scalable Design. With more than 15 teams contributing content, the product design and I relied on reusable frameworks. While she managed updating UI assets, I continually reviewed content to ensure onboarding felt consistent in tone regardless of the feature or platform. These guardrails helped all teams move quickly through ambiguity as Alexa+ evolved.

Cross-Platform Orchestration. I designed conversational journeys that worked seamlessly across Echo devices, the Alexa app, Fire TV, and web. Customers could begin onboarding on one surface and continue on another, so receiving the right mix of voice guidance and screen-based instructions without redundancy or confusion was vital to reducing abandonment.

Balancing Delight With Business Requirements. One of the main challenges was keeping onboarding concise while showcasing Alexa’s new personality and collecting essential account information to set customers up for long-term success. Through iterative testing and collaboration with our researcher and product designer, I identified the highest-value tasks and streamlined how Alexa introduces them to create an engaging first conversation.

Impact

Within hours of Amazon announcing Alexa+ over 4 million customers signed up for early access. This rapid scale and immense interest reinforced the importance of a delightful and meaningful onboarding experience. In the first three months over 1 million customers activated Alexa+ and Amazon continued to add access for additional customer cohorts. The conversational flow I designed helped them understand what was new, set up key features, and connect with the new Alexa. Conversation quality was a consistent customer satisfaction (CSAT) driver in ongoing voice of the customer reports.

As rollout continues, I’m actively refining the experience by expanding support for new AI capabilities, launching new device onboarding conversations, and ensuring the experience scales as Alexa+ evolves.

A detailed case study is available upon request

You can learn more about Alexa+ here