Plan Your APL Experience

If you anticipate that your APL experience requires more than just a simple APL template in support of a limited set of interactions, you need to think about how you want to architect, orchestrate, and facilitate your APL experience. Eventually, you are going to make a set of important architectural design decisions that can greatly affect your productivity and performance of your APL experience in the long run. Not thinking about them systematically, it means you are still making these decisions intuitively but they might not consistently align with APL best practices and your own requirements.

Generally, you should create a plan regardless of the complexity of your use case. At the least, when you create a plan, you go through a thought process to improve the outcome of your intuitive design decisions. At best, you formalize your requirements in a way that aligns with Amazon best practices.

Understand APL Architecture

To plan your APL experiences, you need to understand the four technical actors that play a role in rendering APL documents on Alexa-enabled devices with screens. Read Understand APL Architecture to learn more.

Understand the APL Lifecycles

The main reason for you to consider the APL document lifecycle and to understand the different choices that you make to handle incoming user requests is the significant impact that your decisions can have on UX performance. Read Understand APL Lifecycles for more.

Optimize APL Document Rendering

One important aspect to consider when you make architectural and design-related decisions in your APL project is performance. Rendering new APL documents on Alexa screen devices is a multi-step process that adds latency between a user taking action and the device responding visually. Learn how to improve performance by reading Optimize APL Document Rendering.

Optimize APL document updates

You should, whenever possible, reuse an already rendered APL document and update the existing UI. This is the more efficient alternative to responding to user requests. Read Optimize APL document updates to learn more.

Optimize APL Lifecycles

Similar to how you design dialog-based voice experiences for skills so that you can define intents and slots to build the skills language model, you can design multimodal APL experiences by considering interaction flows that describe how users walk through the experience. Read Optimize APL Lifecycles for more.

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Last updated: Nov 28, 2023