Karen Utley

UX Designer

ABOUT
UX Designer with five years of experience designing and developing end-to-end experiences across web, mobile, multimodal, and TV surfaces for voice and touch. I’m currently leading design for Alexa+ Routines, shaping how millions of people automate their smart home devices with the new Alexa powered by GenAI.
CONNECT
Email
BASED
Southern Indiana
EXPERIENCE
COMPANIES
Amazon
Nordstrom
Tilly's
01
Scout-for-X
Amazon • 2025 - Present
Core team member responsible for establishing best practices and initial user experiences for Alexa+ Scout-for-X feature.

I established key parts of the conversational AI flow including the ability to modify existing searches and established the visual output of active search details.
02
Alexa Routines
Amazon • 2023 - Present
Alexa Routines is a feature used by 38.4M daily active users who perform over 1B weekly actions. Despite this scale, we identified key challenges around discovery, management, and  personalization. To address these issues, I led the development of an 18-month vision for AI-enhanced Routines and automation experiences.

My key design contributions included:
1. Designed end-to-end voice and touch flows for presence-based triggers. Balancing ease-of-use with privacy, transparency and consent.
2. Designed the end-to-end flow for a new calendar-based trigger, collaborating across Alexa teams to seamlessly integrate this feature with existing calendar functionalities.
3. Increased transparency and user confidence by implementing visual status indicators for failed routines.
03
Alexa Communications
Amazon • 2021 - 2023  
I led redesign efforts for Alexa Communications' core messaging feature, enabling millions to broadcast messages across households. I drove design strategy and alignment across Alexa teams.

Other design initiatives I was part of:
1. Shaped new AI-powered Alexa communication features with smart contact disambiguation.
2. Revamped text messaging experience across Echo Show devices, optimizing for both touch and voice.