Case Study

UX Research for Amazon Echo and Sonos Play:5, Concurrent With a PhD

Usability research for Amazon Echo in its first year on the market and for Sonos Play:5, run alongside full-time doctoral research.

UX Researcher & Design Partner, Amazon Echo and Sonos Play:5 Beta Programs November 2014 to December 2015 Consumer hardware, cross-device platforms Human-AI InteractionUX Research
2
Concurrent hardware research engagements
2
Platforms spanning Windows and Android

Situation

Two hardware platforms, Amazon's Echo and Sonos's Play:5, needed real usability research across Windows and Android. I was deep in PhD research at Virginia Tech at the same time. Nothing about either schedule was going to move.

What I Built

  • UX research and evaluation for the Amazon Echo platform in its first year on the market, covering voice interaction and the companion app across Windows and Android, and identifying where voice interactions broke down. Structured feedback on interaction patterns and early AI implementations went to Amazon product staff through an invited early-access program.
  • UX research and usability testing for Sonos's Play:5 platform, partnering directly with product and engineering to refine hardware and software integration and improve adoption.
  • Design recommendations that fed directly into product iteration on both platforms. This wasn't research that got filed away after the readout.
  • A research practice that held up under a genuinely brutal schedule, running two concurrent industry engagements against full-time doctoral research without cutting corners on either.
NOV 2014 DEC 2015 PhD Research, Virginia Tech Amazon Echo UX Research, Nov 2014 to Nov 2015 Sonos Play:5 UX Research, Dec 2014 to Dec 2015
Both industry engagements ran nearly the full year, one month apart, on top of full-time doctoral research.

The Hardest Problem

Cross-device usability research is hard enough when hardware, software, and platform teams are three different groups with three different priorities. Doing it for two companies at once, on two unrelated products, while carrying a full academic research load, meant the research method itself had to be efficient enough to survive the schedule without losing rigor.

Outcome

My Echo recommendations informed product iterations. The Sonos work focused on how hardware and software fit together. The research discipline built here was rigorous, fast, and resistant to schedule pressure. Echo was an early case of the question the rest of this library keeps returning to: a system acting on a person's behalf, and where the interaction breaks down.

Skills Demonstrated

Cross-device usability research, consumer hardware UX, research operations under real time constraints, product-embedded research partnership.

Evaluating me for a role

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