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
Context

Shared accounts, broken personalization

Account sharing was deeply ingrained in how customers used Amazon Music. Even on Family plans—where multiple members could technically be invited via separate Amazon accounts—households frequently shared a single account across devices. This behavior blended listening history, recommendations, and saved content across multiple people, resulting in poor personalization and frequent customer frustration. Rather than being an edge case, shared listening reflected real-world behavior. It revealed a fundamental gap between how identity was designed in Amazon Music and how customers actually used the product.

Identity issues extended across Amazon

This problem wasn’t unique to Music. Across Amazon, customers commonly shared a single account with partners, families, and roommates. While this made sense for managing Prime benefits and subscriptions, it created a growing disconnect between how customers used our products and how Amazon modeled them.

Social Experiences Raised the Stakes for Identity

As Amazon started to expand beyond transactional experiences, social identity became increasingly important. Amazon Shopping began exploring social discovery and creator-led commerce, Prime Gaming introduced public-facing gamer identities, and the acquisition of Twitch brought deeply social norms—usernames, chat presence, and community reputation—into the ecosystem.

Mapping of Amazon identity services

As social features expanded across Amazon, the cracks in the existing identity model became impossible to ignore. Services that were built independently had each defined identity differently—some relied on account names, others on profile nicknames, and others on public-facing usernames. Customers now encountered different names representing the same person depending on where they were in the ecosystem.

Amazon Music's social ambitions started

At the same time, Amazon Music set a long-term goal to invest in social features as a way to attract and retain younger audiences. Social experiences depend on identity that supports expression, visibility, and connection—moving beyond a purely private, functional profile.

This ambition introduced tension. Amazon-wide identity efforts emphasized consistency and standardization, while social experiences required flexibility and personality. Reconciling these goals meant designing an identity model that could feel unified across Amazon while still supporting social expression within Music.
Strategic Mandate

Amazon Music was asked to lead identity unification

Amazon Music was ultimately tasked with setting an example for how the broader Amazon company could move toward solving the account sharing behavior, while balancing social use cases - ultimately creating a identity model that could unify customers' fragmented identities across all services.
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?

Resarch Question 1

What name should we use..?

There was a natural tension between the Amazon Music Identity team and the Social team, as the Social team pushed back on unifying the Amazon Music profile name with the broader Amazon identity. They were concerned that a standardized identity could limit self-expression and feel misaligned with social use cases. In particular, they worried that customers might use household names, such as "Mom," as their PCA names—something that would not work well in social contexts.
Research Findings

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

Research indicated that most customers represent themselves using their first name across key Amazon experiences, with very limited adoption of family-style identifiers. Preferences consistently leaned toward maintaining a single, familiar name across services, reinforcing expectations of continuity and recognition throughout the Amazon ecosystem. In contrast, unique or screen-style usernames were seen as context-specific and were generally expected to remain confined to individual services rather than shared broadly.

Social experiences change how customers think about profile names

When social visibility was introduced (e.g., identity shown to other Amazon Music listeners), customer expectations shifted meaningfully. Preferences diversified beyond real names, with many respondents expressing a desire for unique usernames or nicknames in social contexts, while fewer favored using their first name. This shift highlights the importance of giving customers greater agency over how they present themselves in social interactions on Amazon Music, distinct from more personal or account-level experiences.

Social naming aligns with expectations from Twitch and adjacent experiences

Twitch and Prime Gaming emerged as notable exceptions, with a stronger preference for unique screen-based identities. This likely reflects the inherently social and community-driven nature of these experiences, where interaction, performance, and self-expression are more central than in primarily transactional or personal services.

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

Research Question 2

Licensing restrictions shaped profile availability across tiers

Licensing restrictions limited how many profiles could be supported per plan, forcing a key tradeoff. We explored two models: offering six profiles across all tiers, which would have resulted in mixed benefits for Free, Prime, and Individual Unlimited plans; or restricting six profiles to Family plans and one profile for all other plans.
Research Findings

Mixed benefits confused customers, ads were a dealbreaker for Prime customers

Our research revealed two key customer reactions: first, most customers struggled to understand what “mixed benefits” meant when profile features varied across tiers, leading to confusion and frustration. Second, Prime customers reacted strongly against any model that would expose them to ads, which was a clear non‑starter. These insights reinforced the need for a simple, tier-aligned profile model that preserved the value of Prime and kept profile benefits easy to understand.
Hotly Debated Across Alexa and Amazon Music

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 a centralized identity system, 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.

Bringing Amazon Music and Alexa stakeholders together in NYC

To solve this problem, multiple stakeholders met up in NYC to come up with a mitigation CX. 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 the launch, in which customers can transfer their Amazon Music profiles into a Accounts upon downgrade to enable further usage of their library and social profile upon downgrade.
Recap

Considerations for design and vision

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

E2E Final Designs

See all Amazon Music Projects
Next: Foundations Product Excellence
Se One Park - Principal Product Designer
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