The Top Connections Widget brings the people who matter most to the center of the Amazon's Echo Show home screen. Designed to support spontaneous, everyday connection, it surfaces a customer’s most important contacts by using smart signals and usage patterns. With just a single tap, customers can start a call without needing to reach for their phone. Launched in 13 countries in September 2023, the widget now appears on the home screens of millions of Echo Show devices worldwide.

My Role

As the design lead for this zero-to-one experience, I worked on the end-to-end user experience and visual design from early vision work through global launch. In 2022, the Alexa Communications organization at Amazon introduced a new vision: to focus on helping customers stay connected with their closest loved ones, rather than serving as a general-purpose communication tool.

To help define and align around this shift, I initiated and led a 4 day cross-functional workshop with stakeholders from design, research, engineering, and leadership. This work shaped the organization’s new three-year North Star strategy and influenced product roadmap. The early concepts for the Top Connections Widget emerged from that workshop and were later prioritized as a VP-level goal to deliver in 2022.

I translated the concept into a tangible product by defining the experience strategy, designing custom components and interaction patterns, facilitating user testing, and working closely with engineering to build and refine the experience across Echo Show devices. I also collaborated with localization team to ensure the widget scaled effectively across 13 countries and reached millions of customers.