Building the Alexa Privacy Hub

Overview

Building new content to address privacy concerns for Amazon device users.

Role

As content strategist for the Amazon Device CX Labs Content team, I partnered closely with Amazon Device’s product, marketing, engineering, and legal teams to design content to align with new product releases and address current user pain points. I would present and get buy-in for all new content from these stakeholders, with final approval from the Director of Product Management for Alexa Trust.

Problem

There are several widely publicized issues regarding privacy for both Alexa and Alexa-enabled devices. As new Alexa features continue to roll out, the Amazon Device CX Labs Content team wanted to anticipate and address anticipate and address customers’ evolving privacy concerns, while also improving the overall user experience for Alexa users.

Enter the Alexa Privacy Hub, a way to offer engaging and easy-to-consume content that helps customers learn more how Alexa, Amazon’s voice-controlled virtual assistant, and Alexa-enabled devices work.

Approach

The Hub acts as an iceberg, essentially, in which the most pertinent and generalized content lives on the main page. As you can see, it covers a good deal of ground:

Beyond this content, I built specialized content that each get their own page (linked from the main page). These articles introduce new Alexa features to customers, and show how Amazon devices and Alexa are designed with customer privacy in mind.

Privacy is a complicated topic that requires a tremendous amount of subject matter expertise and attention to detail. These articles needed be highly accessible and transparent. But above all, they needed to be technically and legally accurate.

So, I regularly held sessions with stakeholders who’d built the features, controls, models, and processes to source the necessary information. I also led 4-7 review sessions with stakeholders across 18 teams to elicit feedback for each article.

Finally, each article would be approved by the Director of Product Management for Alexa Trust. Then the articles were ready to be published in line with the feature’s release date.

Here are some examples this more specialized content: (Tap image to open)

Visual ID on Echo Show is a facial recognition feature that lets Alexa show customers personalized recommendations, calendars, to-do lists, and more when their face is recognized by the camera.

Follow Up Mode is a feature that allows Alexa to engage in more natural, free-flowing conversations with its users.

Alexa in the Amazon Shopping app is a free service for anyone with an Amazon account. Many Amazon customers are not aware that this service exists, and once they learn about it, research shows that they have certain privacy concerns surrounding the service.

Results

The Alexa Privacy Hub remains the singular resource for Echo device owners and Alexa users wishing to learn more about the privacy of these products and features.

The Hub has proven to increase privacy protection and Echo owner engagement. In 2022, there were 1.5M visits to the Alexa Privacy Hub. The aim was to increase that number by 59% YoY.