Build Your APL Templates

The APL specification provides a broad set of individual components and features that you can use to implement visual and interactive UI design by creating APL document templates. For details, see APL for Screen Devices Reference. While this reference is useful to understand the functional details of APL documents, it provides only limited guidance about how to use its individual components and features to create and structure templates in a best-practice manner. This best-practice documentation only covers the technical aspects of building APL document templates as a software developer or UX engineer. It is not focused on best practices around designing visually engaging user interfaces using APL as a UX designer. For details about how to design with APL, see Visual Design for Alexa Experiences.

Understand technical design quality

Amazon provides best practices so you can create better quality software and experiences for your users. For APL templates, the outcome you want is a higher quality technical design, and a more engaging multi-modal user experiences for your skills. This begs the question, what does high quality mean for an APL template design and how can you achieve it? Read Understand Technical Design Quality to get the answers.

Optimize template design

APL provides a variety of UI components that help you structure your APL documents and layouts more efficiently and there are concepts you can follow to make resource-efficient use of the components during runtime. To learn more, read Optimize Template Design.

Localize templates efficiently

Skills and their APL documents usually create multi-modal voice experiences for Alexa users that reside in different locales that have their own languages, habits, cultural conventions, and regulations. If you want to how to build localization into your APL templates, read Localize Templates Efficiently.

Build responsiveness into your templates

Responsiveness is the ability of an APL template to adapt its visual appearance and functional behavior to the needs of different screen characteristics. These characteristics include display dimensions and shapes, device modes and orientation. Read Build Responsiveness into Your Templates to learn more.

Optimize template performance

APL templates that perform at a lower level introduce higher latency and visual response times that can make an APL experience less engaging and usable. This can impact the overall quality of your APL experience and the success of your skill. You can learn how to build performance-optimized APL templates. Read Optimize Template Performance for more.

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Last updated: Nov 28, 2023