I am beyond delighted to formally share here that my “secret” Amazon project has finally been announced to the public and is making it into people’s homes. In 2014, I was hired into Amazon as employee #3 on the Echo Look project.

The Echo Look is a first-of-its-kind home photography device that allows customers to document their wardrobes and obtain real-time feedback from stylists from the comfort of their homes. The Echo Look is also fully Alexa enabled – meaning not only hands-free operation of the fashion photography features, but access to everything else Alexa can do.

As the first designer on the project, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help define the vision for the product. I made use of my entire set of design skills to help make the Look a reality: from sketching and storyboarding to running research studies, Arduino prototyping and eventually voice interface design. It was a intense but exciting experience, and I’m grateful to everyone on the team for their passion and hard work in making the Look a reality.

While there is still a great deal I can’t share about the project, I can share a bit about what I learned about new product design from my experiences on the project. I’ve added the Echo Look to my design portfolio at portfolio.cherylplatz.com.

In addition to my official portfolio entry, you can check out my Medium post about storyboarding – I learned a great deal about how to storyboard in an agile way during the Echo Look’s early days, and I want to share my insights with others. That post, “Half the Blank Page”, is actually an updated version of content originally posted to this blog.

You can also join me for the O’Reilly Design Podcast – I recently sat down for an interview with them to discuss not only my role on the Echo Look, but design careers and voice design in general.