SPOTIFY
Integration and design of messenger-based social feature that streamlines music sharing on Spotify.
Project Type: Freelance
Role: UX Designer, UI Designer, UX Researcher
Background
Spotify transformed music listening forever when it launched in 2008. Discover, manage and share over 70 million tracks, including more than 2.6 million podcast titles, for free, or upgrade to Spotify Premium to access exclusive features for music including improved sound quality and an on-demand, offline, and ad-free listening experience. Today, Spotify is the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service with 356m users, including 158m subscribers, across 178 markets.
The Challenge
Spotify has many great features that allow its users to enjoy countless titles. Among these features include personalized content and an intuitive browsing layout that quickly guides users to the songs they’re looking for. Although Spotify has steadily implemented ways on how social components will be accessible to its users over the years, these interactions are currently still limited. The company is looking for a unique way to promote music through social features, starting with mobile devices while maintaining the currently functional system.
Generating Solutions
In order to help Spotify further promote their music and allow users to easily discover new music through communication, the proposed idea would incorporate a messenger-based design that allows in-app sending of Spotify’s contents (songs, playlists, etc). This is reinforced by the integration of the improved but already existing friends feature on Spotify’s desktop version onto its mobile platform. With mobile as one of the predominant platforms, allowing users to easily send songs to others without going through arduous third-party means is important to retaining their active users.
The Design Process
Research
Competitor Analysis
Insight into the Music Streaming Industry
The music streaming service is very popular and consists of many contenders on the market that provide great services to its users. I began by researching in-depth about Spotify that also consists of a strengths and weaknesses profile of its competitors.
User Interviews
Seeking to Understand User Painpoints
The current status of Spotify on mobile offers users limited access to its social features compared to the desktop platform. In order to gain further insight, I’ve conducted user interviews seeking to understand and identify user’s pain points and input on the subject.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
User’s current options consist of mainly external sharing of music which drives traffic away from Spotify.
Participants notice friend’s activities on desktop versions of the app but are not accessible on mobile.
Many participants stated that they are not aware that there were social features incorporated in Spotify.
Participants expressed that it’s difficult to share music and reach out to friends through Spotify.
Define
Persona
To help solidify future design decisions I proceeded to create a persona of an avid Spotify user from the data gained through research. The persona would represent the ideals, pain points, and needs of the users moving forward.
Empathy Map
Gaining Perspective Through the User
To better perceive users through Chris Collins, I created an empathy map that would allow me to identify the various factors that affect the users. The map consist of details that influence his surroundings such as what he hears, thinks, does, and feels. Through this, I can gain a better understanding of the user’s needs when going through the solution-generating process.
CUSTOMER JOURNEY
From Pain Points to Opportunities
Spotify currently has many great features and technology that create a simple and easy process for streaming music. To further dive into the problems and needs of the users, I decided to generate a customer journey that would help funnel the information from both the persona and empathy map to identify possible opportunities towards Spotify’s social features.
Problem Statement
Spotify is currently leading the music streaming service market with its robust product and continued commitment to expanding its music collections. Although successful in their technology of music personalization, the current state of Spotify’s social features lack visibility and interaction among its subscribers. The majority of social features and sharing of music takes place externally from Spotify which if continued would drive traffic away.
Supported Findings
Participants rarely interact with social features (ex. add friends / profile)
Participants not aware that there were social features on Spotify
Navigating to “add friends” on the mobile app is not intuitive and difficult.
Expressed that they would like desktop social features to be implemented on mobile as well.
Generating Ideas
The new feature implemented would be a solution to enhance the visibility of social features towards users while maintaining a simple and easy navigational process. The proposed solution would encompass and provide answers to user pain points that include:
Navigate and utilize existing social features on the mobile platform more easily.
Provide further visibility and integration of the “friend’s activity” feature onto the mobile platform.
Implement an in-app social feature that would allow friends to communicate and send songs to each other.
Proposed Solution
With the majority of users primarily using mobile to access Spotify, the proposed solution would promote social features by integrating friend’s activity onto Spotify’s home screen. To further enhance Spotify’s social interactions, a communication based feature would be included that would allow friends to communicate and share songs directly with one another without having to externally link songs and playlists.
User Flows
Working from the proposed solution, I constructed two user flows that would demonstrate the flow of how the new feature would be integrated into the existing Spotify mobile app. The first flow allows users to select and send a song through the new messenger-based feature with the second reflecting how users access those songs through their notifications.
Ideate
Low-Fidelity Wireframe
Before jumping into designing the social feature, I got creative by sketching out my ideas with pencil and paper. High priority interactions were included in the sketch and translated onto the low-fidelity wireframes.
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
Proceeding with the created low-fi wireframes I began to fill in the UI elements that would require to later on establish a functional prototype of the solution.
Prototype
Prototype
With the mid-fi wireframes completed, I proceeded to construct a prototype to demonstrate the solution. The prototype reflects both user’s flow through scenario-based interactions. Interact with the prototype through these scenarios: Spotify Scenarios
Testing
Usability Testing
To test the functionality of the messenger-based feature, I conducted a usability testing. Data gained from the usability test would provide insight into the intuitiveness of the feature and the pain points of users while navigating the feature.
High Priority Revisions:
Clarify titles on social profiles to reflect friend’s activity.
Include user profile names in the messenger screen to display who the message/song is being sent to.
Iterate on UI elements that would help users identify unopened song notifications while on the messenger screen.
High Fidelity Prototype
From the data analyzed from the usability testing, I implemented the high priority revisions that was required and finalize missing UI elements onto the prototype.
Next Steps
Testing and Iterations
Although high priority elements are included in the prototype, continual testing would help discern more of the user’s concerns and needs as the feature grows.
Build out connecting features
With the minimum viable prototype of the feature at hand, there are many interactions of the features that have not been met. Continuing to build out the rest of the interactions would create a better overview of the feature’s capabilities.
Project Takeaways:
The project provided an opportunity to design a new feature that would be integrated into prominent music streaming app. Through the design process that was followed, the proposed solution presents an opportunity to not only easily allow Spotify users to communicate and share their music but to retain the active users inside the app itself. As the music industry continues to rapidly grow, companies are looking to set themselves apart from the competition. With the new communication-based feature added users no longer need to look towards third-party applications to enjoy music with others.