A redesign of the Prime Video platform that shifts focus to the individual user — connecting their viewing choices with their social groups. Design decisions driven through working sessions with an Amazon UX lead.
[ FIG.01 ]
PRIME VIDEO · REDESIGN
UC BERKELEY EXT · 2020
4 WEEKS · 5 DESIGNERS
We surveyed 100 users across streaming services. 70% preferred a competitor; only 30% chose Prime Video. Our goal: identify the key pain points and redesign the interface to remove the friction.
What emerged was that users felt the Prime Video portal was a generic, nondescript account. There was no way to share movies and shows with friends — and no real interaction between the people watching alongside each other.
Prime Video was developed as an added bonus of a Prime subscription rather than a streaming service in its own right — the experience is optimized for e-commerce, not streaming. We saw an opportunity to redesign for a more personable experience.
[ FIG.02 · Affinity diagram ]
To benchmark, we evaluated three direct competitors (Hulu, Netflix, Disney+) and one indirect (YouTube). The common strengths Prime Video was missing:
[ FIG.03 · Competitor analysis ]
75% of users preferred competitors over Prime Video.
With a sharper picture of the behavioral and cognitive patterns of potential users, we built a primary persona, journey map, and storyboard to anchor every downstream decision.
Active Prime member, 22–38, watches socially. Frustrated by clutter and lack of personalization.
Mapped Katrina's path through the redesigned site — from sign-in to a Watch Party.
Scenario: Katrina opens her favorite streaming platform, picks a film, and invites her sister to a Watch Party — all in two clicks.
How might we help users feel familiar with Prime Video — and delighted to use it — so it becomes their default video streaming platform?
From research and persona work, the team committed to six redesign goals — written tightly so we could check every screen against them.
Decouple Prime Video from the broader Amazon Prime UI for a cleaner, streaming-native experience.
Allow integration of social accounts and improve the Watch Party experience to actually connect viewers.
Add profiles, content suggestions, and recommendations from social-media contacts.
Give users an unambiguous mechanism to distinguish what is included with Prime from what is not.
Build a dedicated Prime Video search that integrates with the store so users always find what they need.
Replace the marketplace ratings with IMDb scores — a source users already trust.
We began with a page-by-page heuristic analysis of Prime Video — homepage, show/movie detail, search, store, and the Watch Party page that users had flagged as most desirable.
[ FIG.04 · Heuristic analysis ]
Given the ambitious goals, we mapped flows for the high-stakes paths so we could test each one independently:
Share content
Search
Watch Party
Search + Store
One of the site's loudest issues was the display of irrelevant information. We ran a card-sorting exercise to redefine the IA — the redesigned sitemap is dramatically more streamlined and intuitive than the original.
Before
After
From there: low-fi wireframes to lay out user-preferred content and to ideate iconography and interactions. Then a style tile referencing Amazon Prime's existing UI guide so the redesign felt familiar — not foreign.
I led the UI redesign objectives and visual style consolidation, and built out a UI component library — atom elements first (text, color, icon components), then nested compounds. Consistent naming made instance swapping painless across the team.
Lo-fi
Style tile
We tested four flows: log in & connect to Facebook · browse the homepage with the Prime Toggle · search a specific movie · create a Watch Party and chat with friends.
[ Usability testing ]
We separated Prime Video from the shopping site, simplifying the navigation to only what's needed for streaming. Because lack of cost transparency was a recurring frustration, we added a Prime Toggle — flip it on to see only what's included with Prime.
Before
AfterThe original Prime tag was a banner; we replaced it with a softer geometric oval. The hover card became its own play button — clicking the image starts content. An info icon opens a pop-up modal with content details, and a separate trailer button lets users explore without committing.
Redesigned cardThe original details view was a separate page — you lost your place every time you clicked. We replaced it with an expanding modal that keeps you on the homepage. Additional episodes scroll horizontally instead of vertically, cutting down the up-and-down rhythm of the original.
Detail modalThe original Watch Party landing was a wall of instructions. We rewrote it as three short bullets and built creating one to be intuitive. A search bar lives directly on the Watch Party page so finding something to watch feels native to the feature.
3-step setupThe original footer dragged in every Amazon subdivision — Prime Video, Amazon Fresh, Sell on Amazon — into one bloated block. We trimmed it to only what's relevant to the streaming platform.
Streamlined footerWe addressed the minor visual issues surfaced in usability testing and built a final hi-fi prototype — including a sharper way to convey the value of integrating Prime Video with social accounts, since that was central to the value proposition.
[ Hi-fi composite ]