Style Hub
"Style by Alexa" — the platform inside the Amazon Shopping app that unified every fashion feature behind one card feed, one card schema, and one deep link router.
By 2019 Amazon's fashion features were scattered. Outfit Compare sat on its own under Programs and Features in the Amazon Shopping app. "Alexa, what should I wear?" and "How do I look?" were about to launch and needed somewhere to live. Each new feature meant another entry in a menu that was already crowded, and none of them could discover each other.
Style Hub — customer-facing name Style by Alexa — was the answer: one destination that served as the common platform for every style feature, present and future. Simplify the menu, make launching a new style feature cheap, give marketing an easily updated set of ingress cards, and let the features cross-promote each other.
I designed and built V1, and designed V2 alongside our product lead.
What it actually is
Three pieces, deliberately small:
- A card template schema, built on JSON Schema, so a card could be defined once and validated on the server when written and on the client when consumed. One shared definition, two enforcement points.
- An extensible card rendering feed, driven by a prebuilt JSON feed definition stored in S3 — so the contents of Style by Alexa could change without an app release, and without an service sitting in the request path.
- A deep link router with a feature registry, processing every incoming deep link and passing web links and deep links through to whichever feature owned them.
V2 added integration with Amazon's content management system so the feed definition file could be updated programmatically rather than by hand.
The goal throughout was a most-lovable-product launch built fast, with minimal engineering, and — critically — low operational load. A JSON file in S3 rather than a service is the entire thesis of the design.
Launching it
Style Hub was built under severe constraints: it ran concurrently with an infrastructure migration mandated to complete by year end, with Virtual Closet taking priority for people, and through repeated project leadership transitions. There was no TPM and no consistent PM, so I handled all partner-team onboarding and communication as well as all of V1's development.
And it was a lynchpin. "What should I wear?" and "How do I look?" were both launching into Style Hub — if it slipped, they slipped. It also required moving Outfit Compare out from directly under Programs and Features to living under Style by Alexa, which meant designing a weblab strategy that could relocate a shipped, live feature without breaking it for anyone mid-flight.
It launched on time and without incident, simultaneously with "What should I wear?" — even though final designs and copy arrived five days before the production launch.
Beyond the launch
Style Hub set the build, linting, and unit testing standards for the React Native features the team subsequently shipped into the Shopping app, and introduced JSON Schema as the team's approach to templated JSON: shared definition, server-side generation and validation, client-side validation and consumption.
To spread the platform knowledge rather than hoard it, I gave a brown bag talk on the nuances of React Native development inside the Shopping app, and wrote up feature development and testing instructions for the team.
Amazon later folded Style by Alexa's capabilities more broadly into the Shopping app and Alexa devices as the Echo Look device was wound down.