Spotify - Adding more features to keep music listeners connected
Spotify’s mission is clear: “to help people listen to whatever music they want, whenever they want, wherever they want—in a completely legal and accessible way.” As a streaming music service, Spotify is the group lead and it wants to stay that way. In order to help Spotify improve engagement and retention in the app, Spotify wants to expand its social capabilities. For this project, I designed a new social feature in order to help people connect with each other through music.
Role
UX Designer
Timeline
1 week
Tools
Figma, sketch
The Challenge
My main challenge with Spotify was to come up with ideas for new features based on research, add in the new features through design seamlessly into the current app.Integrate a new social feature that embeds within the current Spotify mobile app which encourage users to interact with each other through music.
My High level goals were to…
Design a new Social feature for the Spotify iOS mobile app that provides an increased opportunity for users to engage with friends by comparing their musical tastes and recommending content to one another.
My approach
I started by doing market research and conducting user interviews. Then I created empathy maps using results from user interviews and competitor analysis. Creating a new social feature in Spotify was a challenge I spent considerable time in designing user flows. After that I created wireframes, mood board, style guide and high fidelity interactive prototype using Figma.
Lastly, I led the usability testing and used insights to further iterations.
RESEARCH
At the beginning of the research phase, I created a research plan document that included some of my research questions, assumptions, methodologies, and most importantly, goals. A few of these goals include
Understanding the current audio streaming business trends
Understand Spotify’s target audience, and most important
Gain knowledge on user’s behavior using Spotify
Market research
In order to gain a better understanding of the current audio streaming business, on-going trends, and other important statistics, I started my research process by conducting market research. The following are some of the key insights I found through market research
General
Spotify has become the most popular global audio streaming subscription service
The top competitors of Spotify are YouTube, Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, SoundCloud, and Google Play Music.
Over 20,000 songs are added everyday on the platform.
Spotify deprecated their Inbox/Messaging feature due to lack of user engagement
Usage
44% of users listen to Spotify on a daily basis
Around a third of Spotify listening time is spent on Spotify-generated playlists, with another third going on user-generated playlists
Average users listen to 41 unique artists per week
Spotify listeners frequently turn to the streaming service to soundtrack special occasions.
In 2019 more than 60 million users engaged with this feature (Annual “Your Top Songs”), sharing content 40 million times and streaming 6.5 billion songs from the playlists.
Demographics
286 million monthly active users of Spotify
Spotify is the most-popular channel with under-30s,29% of Spotify users are millennials
As of March 2018, Spotify’s user base was dominated by Millennials, with 29 percent of its users aged 25 to 34 and 26 percent aged between 18 and 24 years old
According to a 2018 survey, Spotify reaches almost half of 16 to 24 year olds in the United States each week
Spotify has the most youthful user base of the three platforms (Apple, Spotify, Pandora), with over half of users aged 34 or under, compared with 40% of Apple and 39% of Pandora users
Competitive Analysis
After having a better understanding of the audio streaming business and Spotify itself, I moved on to conducting a competitive analysis to compare the strengths and weaknesses of different companies. I analyzed four direct and one indirect competitors by writing out some of their strengths and weaknesses.
User Interviews
Before moving on to the actual user interview process, I created personas to help me identify the demographics for potential users I can recruit to conduct user interview with. Then I created an Interview script document to fully prepare myself with the necessary information in order to recruit participants and conduct user interviews.
I interviewed 4 participants, who are all Spotify Premium users, individually regarding their music streaming and Spotify experiences. Most of the questions were open-ended questions that target the participants to share their stories. By the end of the interview, I was able to collect qualitative data which I can later synthesize.
Key Takeaways
Market research, analyzing the competitors and user Interviews gave me idea about Spotify market and its users, strengths and weaknesses of music steaming platforms and what do users expect or need from Spotify.
DEFINE AND IDEATE
To begin defining the problem I created user persona, empathy map, project goals and user flow and task flow how a user finishes each task.This is a crucial step in this process because it helps us understand not only what the user’s actions are, but also what the user is thinking about.
Empathy Map
After the user interview process was finished, I created an empathy map document in order to synthesize the data collected from the interviews. I pulled out the following insights to match needs from the empathy map to help me have a better understanding on what goes on in the mind of an actual customer.
User Persona
Based on previous research methods and the insights & needs pulled from the empathy map, I then created a user persona. This user persona serves as a model and helps reflect my design choices in the later stages.
Key Takeaways
Creating a persona, user flows and task flows helped me empathize with users in order to better formulate a solution to their problems. I could then contribute these solutions to my potential website features, and begin working on my ideas for the design through wire framing
BRANDING AND UI
Before moving on to trying to implement the revision ideas, I took a step back into the user interface design section and created a moodboard, style tile, and UI Kit in order to ensure I have a full understanding on how Spotify’s brand portrays their image.
Mood Board
I collected some imagery from Pinterest that was going with Spotify’s Brand like color, background pictures to create a Mood board
Style Tile
Since it is already exciting Brand I used Spotify’s color palette, Logo in different color backgrounds and typography close to the original. Also I created some of the icons and imagery going with spotify.
UI Kit
Then I created UI KIT based on style tile, it consists of all the buttons, icons, cards, images used in my design.
Key Takeaways
Creating Spotify Mood Board and Style tile helped to understand the brand and this whole project was challenging. For designing new screens, the existing design pattern had to be thoroughly analyzed in order to embed into the existing app seamlessly. It was necessary to check how Spotify has been changing their design. I learned that it is important to know the history of the product.
USABILITY TEST
After forming a clear picture of the site structure and flow between pages, I was ready to test for usability with my prototype. In order to conduct a usability test, I created a usability test plan in order to have a visual guide on what I will be expecting for the test.
Low Fidelity Sketches
Based on the tasks that I previously created, I sketched out all the necessary screens I made minor changes in the buttons and background color of the app, I had to keep in mind that the designs need to fit seamlessly within the existing app.
High Fidelity Wireframes
After creating low-fi sketches, I moved on to designing high-fidelity wireframes of all the screens necessary in order to use later for conducting usability test. The following images are of a the high-fidelity screens that I created.
Affinity Map
After collecting qualitative data from the users through the usability test, I created an Affinity Map to synthesize the data recorded from the test. I was able to pull out three insights based on similar patterns from the users. With the three insights, I came up with three revision ideas that I can then try to implement in order to create a better design.
Key Takeaways
Testing with my wire frames gave me the flexibility to quickly incorporate any changes needed to the design. I learned how to remotely conduct a usability test and got more comfortable with letting participants lead the way after giving them tasks. The affinity map helped me summarize their thoughts into one space, and further guided me on how to improve my design.
My learning
I faced new challenges during this project that I haven’t faced before - seamlessly integrating a new feature into an existing design and designing for a mobile application that I wasn’t entirely familiar with.
Through this project, I learned the importance of really diving into studying the existing design and flow of the application to introduce a new feature that looks and feels like Spotify’s existing design. Doing research on the background and how the app evolved was also key to identifying the best solutions for the problems at hand.Looking back at all stages and all the process I have gone throughout this project, I can say that this one has definitely left a great impact on me. Being a Spotify user for quite some time, it was very interesting to not only just design new features but also do research and conduct tests to help me understand more about Spotify in general.