Amazon Creator Portal: letting customers upload product videos.

Amazon customers can now add videos to their favorite products through the Related Video Shorts widget on product detail pages.

This case study describes the new video-uploading experience for customers on amazon.com — across both mobile and desktop.

Product problem

Amazon didn't have enough coverage of up-to-date, high-quality video content. Producing our own videos and partnering with third parties is slow and doesn't scale.

Hypothesis

Incentivizing customers and making it easy for them to create videos will give Amazon access to more high-quality content. We could prove this by designing an experience that lets customers upload video content via mobile or desktop.

My role

I was the sole UX designer on a team of two developers and a PM. I was responsible for the design direction of the project, while collaborating with the team on ideation.

As I envisioned letting customers upload videos, I needed qualitative and quantitative data to support my design thinking and inform leadership of what customers want and need. I partnered with the PM to uncover customer insights through a series of interviews about behaviors and motivations while shopping.

The interviews showed that: customers find videos related to products very useful — especially when made by other customers and including product feedback. Having followers motivates customers to upload videos, and people want a place to follow influencers and watch their content.

We decided to create a feature that helps customers record and upload videos related to products.

To start, I created provisional personas of potential users based on PM knowledge and my understanding of the users. These were built on assumptions rather than full research, but I could return to them again and again to help make design decisions when the objective was unclear.

The Fogg Behavior Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: motivation, ability, and a trigger. When a behavior doesn't occur, at least one of those is missing.

• Motivation: the user responds to a cue that starts her thinking about an action, reacts intuitively to the idea, then evaluates its cost and benefits.
• Simplicity (ability): the user knows where to go to upload videos via the Amazon app.
• Trigger: the timing is right — the user has the tool and the motivation to record a video.

I designed a user flow diagram to illustrate every step required to accomplish the app's primary objective: "As an Amazon customer, I want to share my opinion about a well-known product through a video to influence others about its advantages and disadvantages."

The video shopping experience team owns the video carousel on the product detail page. This widget shows videos related to the product — side-by-side comparisons, unboxings, how-tos, or simple product advice from other shoppers.

Adding an ingress point in the Related Video Shorts (RVS) widget makes sense because that's where all the video selection lives. This entry point exists on both desktop and mobile.

Step 1 — Selecting the media

Clicking "Upload your video" from the product detail page opens the media selector with three options: take a video, photo library, and other. "Other" lets users select videos from services like Dropbox or Google Cloud. The user chooses to record a video, the recording feature opens, and they take a video.

Mobile prototyping with Axure RP

Axure proved to be the best tool for prototyping. Because of tight timelines, I chose to develop a high-fidelity prototype, which had both benefits and drawbacks. The prototype was a powerful tool for creating transparency during the design process — my WYSIWYG approach was the most effective way to gain feedback from the team, quorum from developers, and approval from leadership. Within the prototype, scroll down and look for "Be the first video" to start uploading.

In your Amazon mobile app or browser, search for any product — you should see a button to "Upload your video." Tap it and submit a video; we'd love to see it.

The launch of the Creator Portal feature had a significant positive impact on uploading and managing videos, enabling Amazon to scale video content through customer contributions.