Amazon Announcement Hub
The centralized source of critical program and policy updates for transportation partners
The Challenge
Have you seen Amazon delivery vehicles in your neighborhood? Those drivers work for independent logistics businesses called Delivery Service Partners (DSPs). They are strategic partners of Amazon’s supply chain, delivering over 20 million packages daily across 19 countries.
Amazon’s continuous innovation brings a significant number of program changes—275 in 2023 alone—that directly impact DSPs' operations and profitability.
However, long wait times between announcements and implementation, coupled with a lack of regular progress updates, leave DSPs in the dark regarding the status of these changes. As a result, DSPs begin to doubt Amazon’s ability to fulfill its commitments, undermining trust and transparency that are essential for maintaining a robust partnership.
The Objective
DSPs need a centralized location that visibly shows progress on programmatic updates.
Role
Lead UX Designer
Duration
2 months (research and design iteration)
Team
5 core project team members including designer, product manager, developers, and data analyst
Opportunity Statement
How might we provide DSPs visibility into programmatic updates, so they could build trustworthy partnerships with Amazon and effectively prepare for changes?
The DSP program
When customers make their purchases online, Amazon’s people, technology, and operations work together to fulfill their orders.
The items are packed at fulfillment centers and then sent to delivery stations. At the delivery stations, packages are prepared to be loaded into delivery vehicles, which is where DSPs come in.
Each morning, DSPs lead their teams of delivery associates as they load packages into their vehicles and deliver them to customers’ homes and businesses.
The ever-changing landscape of logistics business
The DSP program constantly evolves as Amazon adapts to market trends and corporate strategy. Here are a few examples of what Amazon announced in 2023.
The monthly engagement survey revealed ongoing dissatisfaction among DSPs regarding program changes. They struggle with change preparation, citing the short 7-14 day lead time and lack of resources and support as the primary causes.
Diving deep into customer problem
To shed light on this emerging customer problem, I conducted in-depth 1:1 interviews with 8 DSP users, ensuring a representative sample in terms of demographics, tenure, and program type (see research plan here). I explored several key topics through both exploratory and evaluative questions:
Current practices: How do DSPs stay updated on program changes? This includes their activities, tools used, roles interacted with, and communication channels.
Pain points: What challenges do DSPs face in tracking program updates, and what improvements would they like in current tools or processes?
Ideal experience: What would an ideal experience look like for DSPs? This includes preferred platforms, desired features, notification preferences, and more.
DSPs struggle to recall what has been announced.
They talk about them all, at Ignite Live, I think it was like 60 changes. To be honest with you, I can hardly recall any of them, except there's a few that stand out, but that's about it.
I attempted to take notes and recall all of the wonderful news, but missed several that I wish I could share with my team.
DSPs learn about program updates through various isolated channels, resulting in a high cognitive load and scattered, repetitive information.
Right now, we get things repeatedly, and it's to the point where it's spam… It's like, oh, my God, leave me alone. It's the same message, and we'll get it in 14 different things. How many times do I need to see this?
There are times that I will get between 40 and 100 emails from Amazon a day. That's useless. You know, too many decisions means nothing, too many choices means nothing.
The lack of progress updates undermines the trust between DSPs and Amazon, causing disruptions in operational planning.
Some of these announcements are incredibly important to us, but we never hear anything again. And then somebody says it's in Q1 of 2024. Then Q1 comes around. We'll ask the question on Ignite or amongst our fellow DSPs. Anybody heard anybody heard? No, nobody knows. It just disappears off the radar.
DSPs desire transparency and two-way communication in Amazon's decision-making process.
Currently, it's not a two-way communication. Amazon pushes its agenda at us on Ignite by making announcements. Most of the time, when we post something and don't hear any comment from Amazon, the post just goes into a black hole.
Identifying the root cause
In addition to understanding the external customer problem, it was crucial to identify the root cause: Why are our commitments to DSPs not being honored? What internal mechanisms have failed?
Most program changes are announced at Ignite Live, an annual event that unites Amazon and DSPs. The DSP Change Management team and the Events & Communications team are responsible for managing the announcements. However, collaboration between these teams faced challenges due to unestablished mechanisms.
Since the event, two projects slipped past their committed date without communication to DSPs. The monthly flash showed that although on paper Amazon has delivered 97.6% of changes, 45% of those did not have established timelines.
Current workflow of managing announcements
Design ideation
The first challenge was identifying a platform for Announcement Hub. DSPs were already juggling an array of tools in their operations, certainly didn't need another item on their list.
By aligning user feedback with business objectives, I secured stakeholder agreement to integrate Announcement Hub into Ignite, Amazon's digital community for DSPs. This leveraged the existing commenting feature there and aligned with the community's strategic roadmap.
With this foundational question addressed, I facilitated several brainstorming sessions with product and engineering teams, rapidly iterating with low-fidelity wireframes.
Below: Building the information architecture
Below: Low-fidelity wireframes for rapid iterations
🌟 Final design handoff
Access and navigation
❶ Users can access Announcement Hub from the main navigation on desktop and mobile.
❷ The homepage widget enhances discoverability, ensuring all users are informed about the latest program updates without needing to visit the Hub directly.
Versatile layout
More than 60% of DSPs access the community via mobile app. It was important to ensure all users can easily consume information and take actions, regardless of the type of devices they use.
How to fit an entire data table on a mobile screen? The short answer is we can't. And we shouldn't force users to view table columns in a landscape view. My solution was a versatile layout that seamlessly transforms between desktop and mobile devices.
To maintain context, headers and columns are fixed while scrolling.
Simplified card view for mobile
On mobile devices, the dashboard transforms tabular data into card view, offering a non-hierarchical way for DSPs to view announcements.
Each card has a consistent layout that facilitates easy scanning and highlights important information.
The engagement options are also aligned with the desktop experience, ensuring a seamless and intuitive user interaction across all devices.
Interactions and filtering
🎯 The "Unreads" toggle helps users quickly locate items with unread updates.
🔔 Users can proactively turn on notifications to receive updates, so they never miss important Amazon communications.
🔗 Users can save an item for later, or share it with other community members.
🔍 Filtering functionalities allow users to refine results to the specific information they need, such as looking up program changes that will be launched in the next quarter.
Announcement detail page
Behind the scenes: The admin workflow
The customer-facing experience is great. But how will admins upload and manage content on Announcement Hub in the first place?
As a crucial part of this project, I worked closely with the community managers to map out their end-to-end workflow, including the processes of creating and editing an announcement.
Create an announcement
The announcement creation form is streamlined to ask only for necessary information, following the logical steps an admin would take when entering data.
Select flexible launch timelines
One of the business intricacies is that Amazon may not have a uniform answer for how precise the targeted launch timeline will be. It could range from an exact date to a roughly estimated quarter.
To address this concern, the design offers admins flexible timestamp options: choose from date pickers, months, quarters, or years.
Edit an announcement
Admins need the ability to update announcements post-publication, without necessarily reflecting every change in the customer-facing event timeline. For instance, correcting a typo doesn't warrant user notification.
This design allows admins to choose whether to publish edits as official updates. If they do, they can provide context to DSPs through free-form text or links to posts from Amazon leaders.
Enhancing the internal mechanism
Steve Jobs once said, "Design is not just how it looks; it's how it works." Across the entire DSP business, we needed a centralized process to align internal, cross-functional teams on key updates for DSPs. This included addressing date slip risks, deprioritizations of commitments, shifts in rollout plans, or confirming project status.
Drawing from research insights and advocating for users, I collaborated closely with product and business stakeholders to define a new mechanism for steady, accurate updates in the Announcement Hub. This approach established pathways that foster visibility, and facilitated essential discussions before and after announcing program changes to DSPs.
Measuring success
The Announcement Hub is currently in the implementation phase and is scheduled to launch during the Ignite Live event in September 2024.
In the meantime, the planned success metrics include:
Perception: Increase the overall Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) from the 2023 baseline of 53.93% and the Change Preparation CSAT from the 2023 baseline of 34.2%.
Accountability: Meet Amazon's committed dates or report out on 100% of date changes.
We will also track feature usage and engagement, aiming for a 60% click-through rate (CTR) among active users in the first month and maintaining a 40% CTR measured quarterly thereafter.