Amazon FTUE
An onboarding experience designed to help new users navigate Amazon's Manga Store
Product Designer — Sebastien Chery
Overview
After my internship at Amazon, I was invited to join a Kindle team at Amazon Japan as a product designer.
My role in this project was to own the UX strategy from end-to-end. I led stakeholder alignment across global and local teams, and produced wireframes with engineer-ready specs.
Problem
How might we introduce new users to Amazon's Manga Store features?
Research showed 1.5M first-time users dropped off before engaging with high-value conversion drivers like free samples and discounts. This friction hurt monetization and prevented the Manga store from capturing market share in a crowded Japanese market.
Solution
I designed a six-card onboarding flow using progressive disclosure. Leading with discovery features that allowed users to feel ownership over their exploration before encountering rewards.
The final card presented discounts as rewards that would expire if unused. This nudge turned curious browsers into high-intent buyers.
Team
Cross-functional collaboration with engineering, international teams, and product managers.
Deliverable — Complete end-to-end widget for A/B testing.
Design Process
Discovery — I reviewed findings from an Amazon Japan storefront study and observed nine first-time user sessions to understand how new users discovered content and where they dropped off in the purchase journey. The research showed that early discovery friction reduced engagement before users reached the reward stage.
I then facilitated an alignment session with product, marketing, and localization stakeholders to clarify business goals, technical constraints, and onboarding requirements.
The qualitative behavioral data and alignment session produced the insight that guided the design:
• Reduce early discovery friction by leading with content exploration before rewards.
Ideation — I translated research and alignment session insights into a journey map to help stakeholders visualize user states and drop-off risks across three onboarding stages, Awareness, Consideration, and Acquisition.
The artifact allowed engineering and product stakeholders to evaluate how the card sequence could influence monetization:
• Early stages should emphasize guided discovery to reduce information overload and build confidence.
• Later stages should introduce clear incentives and urgency to convert interest into purchase:
• Later stages should introduce clear incentives and urgency to convert interest into purchase:
Development — I created a user flow to show how the onboarding cards guide users from discovery to purchase.
Each card introduces discovery features, builds confidence, and moves users toward activation and purchase.
The wireframe helped stakeholders evaluate conversion risks, placement logic, and incentive timing, ensuring the onboarding flow supported experimentation, measurable gains in engagement, and purchase conversion during future A/B tests:
Engineering Handoff — I structured all components in Figma Dev Mode using Amazon's AUI component library alongside custom elements. The handoff included edge cases and annotations for both the international and the manga team.
Results
The onboarding flow reduced the drop-off among 1.5M passive users by changing how value appeared in the FTUE.
Fast previews loaded asynchronously, letting users explore content immediately and lowering friction early in the journey.
The widget was built for rapid experimentation, with components that supported ongoing A/B tests of incentives and pricing.
The result was a scalable onboarding framework that improved purchase conversion and long-term user value (LTV).
What I'd Do Differently
Early in the project, stakeholders were concerned that users might leave before reaching the incentives at the end of the flow. I created a journey map to show where drop-off could happen and how delaying incentives might affect completion.
I would raise this risk earlier and frame it more clearly.