Team

Individual design work.
Worked with over 6 different business verticals, spanning across Alexa, Retail, Central Identity, and many more.

Role

Create E2E UX flows for mobile, mWeb, web, and desktop app.
User research and testing.

Duration

Feb 2021 - Dec 2024

Final Designs

Impact (1-Month Data)

Customer Problem

One Amazon user, multiple profile systems

Customers expect to experience Amazon as a single ecosystem and their identity and personalization to carry seamlessly across products/services.
In reality, profiles already existed across Amazon - however each were built for different use cases, governed by different rules, and capped at different limits. This created a fragmented mental model where “profiles” meant different things depending on where customers encountered them.

Mapping of Amazon identity services

Goal

Music to define how to identity works across Amazon

Amazon Music was tasked with leading the shift toward a more centralized identity model leveraging "PCA" or Person-Centric Amazon profile model. Beyond adoption, Music needed to demonstrate how a unified identity could work with social features without increasing complexity for customers. This required designing profiles that felt consistent with Amazon-wide expectations, respected plan and licensing constraints, and clearly connected listening behavior with social expression—setting a scalable precedent for other teams to follow.
Challenge

How might we create a profile experience in Amazon Music that feels consistent with Amazon as a whole, while enabling personalized and social listening within real licensing constraints?

Context - PCA Profiles

Why the shift to using PCA profiles?

Historically, Amazon relied on a single customer account as the primary way to establish identity and personalization across services. Over time, account sharing became a common and expected behavior—especially across entertainment experiences—making it increasingly difficult to understand and serve individual people within a shared account. To deliver more accurate personalization, preferences, and social experiences, Amazon needed to evolve from an account-centric model to a person-centric one, where each individual could be represented distinctly while still living under a shared household account. This shift created the foundation for profiles as the primary unit of identity and personalization.

Amazon Music Family plan usage didn’t match how people actually listened

Within Amazon Music, account sharing was especially prevalent among Family plan customers. While the plan technically supported multiple members by inviting separate Amazon accounts, many households instead shared a single account across devices for convenience. As a result, listening history, recommendations, and playlists were blended across multiple people, leading to degraded personalization and confusion around saved content. This gap between how the product was designed to work and how customers actually behaved highlighted the need for a simpler, person-centric profile model that matched real-world usage.

Licensing restrictions shaped profile availability across tiers

Music licensing agreements limited how many distinct listening profiles we could support per plan, shaping how profiles could scale across Free, Prime, and Unlimited tiers. We evaluated multiple models that expanded profile access, but research and cross-team alignment showed these approaches would risk degrading the Prime experience. We ultimately chose a clearer model that balanced customer expectations and plan value: one profile for Free, Prime, and Individual Unlimited plans, and up to six profiles for Family plans.
Context - Social Strategy

Balancing Amazon Music's bet on Social with a unified identity strategy

Amazon Music’s push to build more social features—particularly to attract younger audiences—required an identity model that supported public expression, connections, and discovery. At the same time, Amazon-wide efforts were focused on unifying identity under a single, person-centric framework, prioritizing consistency and interoperability across services. These two goals were often at odds: social experiences thrive on visibility and differentiation, while a unified identity demands clarity and constraint.

My role was to factor both into a cohesive strategy—designing profiles that aligned with Amazon-wide identity standards while still enabling the flexibility and expression needed for social use cases. This balance shaped key design decisions around profile visibility, structure, and scalability, ensuring the system could serve both immediate product needs and long-term platform goals.

Considerations for design strategy

- Cross business vertical identity requirements (varying per business i.e. Alexa vs Fire TV)
- Family plan usage (CID vs PID)
- Music licensing restrictions (different profile availability based on tiers)
- Harmonizing social strategy with unified identity goal

Hotly Debated Topic 1

Social name vs PCA name

The Amazon Music social team pushed back on using the same profile name for social experiences, concerned that a standardized identity could limit expression and feel misaligned with social use cases. They were especially afraid that customers would use household names, such as "Mom" as their PCA names, which was not suitable in the social use case. To resolve this, we focused research on how customers name themselves today, whether they expect custom names to carry across Amazon, how they feel encountering different names across Music and Alexa, and whether a shared identity works as a social presence. These insights helped define where consistency was critical and where Music could support flexibility without fragmenting identity.
Research Findings

Existing exposure to PCA profile names in Alexa and Prime Video set baseline expectations for identity in Amazon Music.

We learned that 70% and 81% of respondents self report having their first name as PCA name on Prime Video and Alexa respectively. Only 2% of respondents self report having a family identifier as PCA name for Prime Video, and 0% of respondents reported on Alexa.

Customers perceive their identity to be consistent across Amazon Music, Alexa, Prime Video, and across all of Amazon.

We saw a strong signal from customers to keep their first name across Fire TV, Amazon retail, Kindle, Luna, Audible, Pharmacy, Amazon Music, Alexa, and Prime Video. At least 75% of customers preferred to have the same name across these services. 76% of respondents specifically preferred to be represented by their first name on Amazon Music and Prime Video, and 79% for Alexa. Only 1% of participants wanted their unique screen username to propagate across different services. Therefore, customers expect names to be propagated across different Amazon services, but the unique screen username should be gated/confined to each service.

Social experiences change how customers think about profile names

When we introduce social factors into the survey (i.e., Your identity as an authoring playlist creator is visible to other AM users), we see a shift in respondent expectations. 39% of respondents preferred to have a unique screen username and 17% preferred to have a nickname. 29% of respondents wanted to use their first name in social scenarios. Further suggesting that customers need social engagements on Amazon Music to allow room for agency in social identity.

Social naming aligns with expectations from Twitch and adjacent experiences

Twitch and Prime Gaming were an exception to this identity finding, as 54% and 41% respectively preferred to be referred by unique screen username. This could be because those services are related to gaming and are inherently more social by engaging with other people.

In conclusion, customers value consistency for names across Amazon, but desire flexibility in creating a social-facing identity.

Hotly Debated Topic 2

What happens to profiles upon downgrade?

Previously, all voice signals were captured and displayed on the visual app. So if a guest or your child creates a playlist, the playlist ownership is attributed to the account holder. However, with PCA profiles, we are attributing the playlists to each respective profile. The issue is with licensing, on non-family plan customers will only be able to get 1 primary profile. Meaning, playlists they were able to access from secondary profiles are now going to be gated behind a paywall for family plan. This problem becomes more evident with family plan downgrade customers who will lose access to their profiles.
Offsite

Bringing Amazon Music and Alexa stakeholders together in NYC

To solve this HDT, multiple stakeholders met up in NYC to come up with a mitigation CX. Due to the core issue we are solving with Canary and social implications, we aligned that secondary profile's content shouldn't pollute primary PID's library or social profile. As a mitigation, we agreed to introduce a profile transfer feature as part of Canary WW launch, in which customers can transfer their PID-based AM experience into a CID upon downgrade to enable further usage of their library and social profile upon downgrade.

E2E Final Designs

See all Amazon Music Projects
Next: Library Migration
Se One Park - Principal Product Designer
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