Astro Design Language + Companion App
Company: Amazon (Lab126)
Role: Visual UX Designer, Consumer Robotics (CoRo)
Date: Oct 2020 – Oct 2021
The bottom line
Preparing Amazon’s first consumer robot for its V1 launch required aligning cross-functional standards across hardware UX, Voice UI, robotic choreography, and creative technology. With an audit framework, I executed cross-team gap analyses, creating the Astro Design Language to collate these domains into a cohesive standards library.
The friction
During this inaugural hardware launch, this new terrain required visual consistency. The user experience across the mobile app, device screen, and physical robotic movements lacked a centralized source of truth because traditional systems couldn't account for all the domains and disciplines we were created for and with.
The strategy
Rather than executing within a vacuum, I proactively took ownership of the system’s health and expansion.
Maturity framework & audits: Designed internal surveys and conducted cross-team interviews to diagnose friction and assess the system's scalability, to include typography inconsistencies and component gaps.
Systemic synthesis: Gathered, analyzed, and unified the divergent rules of VUI designers, hardware engineers, and physical robot choreographers into robust resource in InVision DSM and Confluence.
Visual design expansion: Evolved the "Pathways" system, developing precise gesture and motion indicators that translated the robot's physical intentions into the system’s live view. I created an illustration system, loader animations, and cross-surface iconography.
The impact
The Astro Design Language successfully stabilized our standards and design references into a repeatable, scalable framework. By marrying interaction rigor with expressive visual system design, we delivered a unified multi-surface ecosystem that set the operational baseline for Amazon's Consumer Robotics (CoRo) roadmap.
Note: Due to the proprietary nature of Amazon's consumer robotics division, comps and specific internal workflows have been abstracted in this presentation.