Livestream Shopping on Amazon

The Problem

Shopping online made it easy to compare products—but harder to experience them. Reviews could tell customers what other people thought, but not always how a product worked, looked, or performed in use. Livestreaming created an opportunity to bring demonstrations and real-time answers directly into Amazon’s shopping experience.

The Design Challenge

Live video introduced a different rhythm into shopping. Customers needed to browse deals, compare products, and investigate details at their own pace, while a broadcast moved continuously.

The design challenge was to connect those experiences: make demonstrations useful at the moment of consideration, keep featured products easy to find, and let customers choose how much attention to give the stream.

Company

Amazon

Timeline

March 2017 – May 2019 (2 years, 3 months) Launched

Role

Lead Sr. UX Designer

I led the customer experience for bringing livestream shopping into Amazon, working across product, engineering, research, and the emerging Amazon Live ecosystem. My focus was determining where live video could meaningfully improve shopping—and where it would get in the way.

Tools

Figma
UserTesting
Adobe Photoshop

TL;DR

Designing livestream shopping around customers’ intent.

Tested Concepts

I prototyped multiple ways for live video, featured products, deals, and customer interaction to coexist within Amazon’s existing shopping experience.

A wireframe of the livestream on Amazon's mobile app: a video banner above the products it features

Designing Around Three Competing Needs

Preserve the Shopping Experience

The stream needed to coexist with browsing. I explored compact and expanded video layouts so customers could engage with a demonstration while retaining access to products and deals.

The tradeoff was prominence versus interruption: giving video enough visibility to be discovered without allowing it to dominate the shopping experience.
Connect the Demonstration to the Product

I explored product placements beside and below the video to connect what customers were watching with items they could investigate.

The interaction depended on more than layout. The featured product also needed to match what the host was discussing at that moment.
Support Deeper Engagement Without Requiring It

The concepts included picture-in-picture viewing, real-time questions, and dedicated space for captions. These explored different ways to continue watching, investigate a product, or ask for clarification while preserving the customer’s ability to keep shopping.

What Testing Revealed

In testing, only 3 of 14 participants used the stream without prompting. One participant summarized the tension: “I’m here for deals, not chatty-chatty.”

That finding challenged the assumption that making live content available would make it useful. It pointed toward a more selective experience: relevant demonstrations, concise content, and customer control over participation.

A second issue emerged at the connection between video and shopping. Product highlights could lag the broadcast by more than three minutes, while add-to-cart activity from the carousel remained low. Synchronizing the featured product with the demonstration became an important opportunity for the next iteration.

Outcome