SPOTIFY Social Feature
Spotify’s new location-based social feature encourages a shift from one-on-one to community interactions.
Favoring human and emotional connection, it focuses on a shared love of discovering new music.
iPhone prototype
00 Introduction
CLIENT — spotify
ROLE — UX | UI designer
TIME frame — 80 hours
budget — shoestring
focus — adding a feature
concentrate — research
Background
Spotify, leader in streaming music, seeks to deepen impact on users. While a few core capabilities such as following artists and friends and a basic activity feed are currently implemented, a shift from person-to-person to group interactions may add product value. The new social feature should be in favor of human and emotional connection, with a focus on music. It is important to note that Spotify does not, however, intend on becoming the next social network platform.
Personal Challenge
To narrow the scope and explore solutions for a specific problem, I wanted to think of how Spotify can enhance and influence a user’s life by building onto their day-to-day activities. The concept of incorporating fun into a 9-to-5 job, a workout class, a social gathering is interesting to me.
How can we associate Spotify with the fun? How can we use and manage our environment through Spotify?
Solution
In analyzing user survey responses from Spotify users, I saw an opportunity to use small local business playlists as a feature to facilitate non-intrusive single-to-group interactions. A second user group cropped up as a result — the local business owners and employees. I conducted focus group interviews on the latter to gauge if the social feature would equally interest and benefit their businesses.
From the research, I designed an “Explore the Neighborhood” feature under the Home tab, functioning on location-based services to access business playlists within a 5 mile radius of the user’s immediate location. A corresponding “Nearby” feature under the Your Library tab provides further exploratory features such as “Discover By Activity”, “Discover By Distance”, and “Recently Explored”.
01 Research
SECONDAry research | competitive analysis
SURVEY
focus group interviews
analyze findings | prepare proposal
Methodologies
Competitive Analysis: an analysis of competitors.
App Audit: walk-throughs of user journeys on competitive platforms.
Survey: quantitative insight on user behavior, preferences, pains, and gains.
Focus Group Interviews: further qualitative insight after analysis of survey results.
Competitive Analysis
Drawing out the pros and cons of competitor approaches to streaming music, I noticed a common struggle to answer user needs in discovering new music and building personal libraries. It’s interesting that most music apps are a smaller piece of the puzzle, which means they’re pulling from and catering to an existing consumer base of a bigger business.
YouTube Music and Google Play Music are best for heavy Google users, Amazon Music is best for Amazon Prime members, and Apple Music is best for users committed to the Apple ecosystem, with large preexisting iTunes libraries. Pandora is the only one unaffiliated with a larger business, but it speaks to a laid-back listener who is usually older and nostalgic for the radio station experience.
Survey
Through a Typeform survey, I collected online responses to retrieve quantitative insight on user behavior, preferences, pains, and gains.
Key Findings
Most Spotify users keep social media sharing to a minimum, preferring to be private with their listening experience and personal playlists. Those who follow friends and artists have minimal and inconsistent interactions.
Most Spotify users discover new music solely through the app in the forms of curated playlists, radio stations, and “Artists Similar To” features. Fewer discover music through friends or other media outlets.
When hearing an unknown song they like, users turn to Shazam, Siri, and or Google for identification. Most would rather miss out on a song than to ask an employee or to initiate conversation with another person.
Focus Group Interviews
With small business owners, I wanted to figure out their pain points, what’s lacking in the current experience being offered, and how might we specialize the new feature to better answer business needs. With employees, I was interested in what factors play into their musical decisions, who the curators are, motivations and goals for the music they share, and their personal preferences in listening, discovering, and sharing music.
Key Findings
For many businesses, there is no official playlist. Employees play their own music or create work-specific playlists based on their understanding of the brand. If two or more employees are on shift, a verbal agreement and joint decision determines the genre or artist, which can be dependent on the time of the day. Once their shift is over, another employee will take over DJ duty.
Spotify's recommendations spotlight popular artists or songs, rarely niche, underground, obscure, off-the-radar artists with more specialized musical tastes — here’s an interesting article addressing artist frustrations with the discovery algorithm. Employees often discover unique music during their travels or from other people and they enjoy passing these songs along.
Being active and regularly engaged on social media does not necessarily fit into every brand’s promoted lifestyle.
It’s all about the customer experience. Music is not just something as superficial as the brand image — it informs the designing process of the experience. A successful experience is so memorable that a patron should wish to relive it and revisit.
Analysis
From the collected responses, the following priorities were identified for the two user groups:
Spotify Users
Identify unknown music in real life scenarios, independent from Shazam.
Discover new music through the Spotify app.
Independent from following or subscribing to artists and friends.
Small Business Owners and EmployeesOne place to build, manage, organize, and collaborate on playlists.
Extend the brand experience beyond locational constraints.
Exposure for under the radar artists and music.
Independent from engaging in social media features.
02 Define
provisional archetypes
Provisional Archetypes
03 Information Architecture
user JOURNEYs
User Journeys
Basic user journeys for the Spotify user and the business user to inform flows.
04 Design
initial sketches
HI-FI wireframes
—
HI-FI ui designs
Initial Sketches
The challenge is to seamlessly nest the new feature into the app in a way that the user would intuitively expect in terms of placement, navigation, and vibes. Since Spotify uses circular images for their artist features and square images for their playlist and genre features, I made a design decision to go with circular for business features including “Recently Explored” and square for the “Discover By Activity”and “Discover By Distance” features.
High-Fidelity Responsive Wireframes
With Spotify’s design library in mind, I created high-fidelity wireframes for iPhone from my sketch mock-ups.
Home tab
your library tab
High-Fidelity Responsive UI Designs
Designing high-fidelity UI screens for iPhone, I focused on font sizing, design blocks, image selection, coloring, and photo editing. If I’ve done my job correctly, the new feature should be visually delightful, but unsurprising, cohered to Spotify’s branding.
home tab
your library tab
05 Implementation & Reiteration
HI-FI prototype
—
usability test
analysis of findings
—
priority revisions
High-Fidelity Prototypes
With InVision, I created a high-fidelity interactive prototype for iPhone. Give the prototype a play or check out the video run-through below.
iphone video run-through
Usability Testing
Goals
Test usability of new feature with focus on seamless integration with Spotify’s branded UI, navigational ease, unsurprising transitions, CTA button effectivity, and stress levels throughout discovery and browsing experience.
Test whether nesting of “Nearby” feature makes sense in the Your Library tab.
Test whether discovery features such as “Discover by Activity” and “Discover by Distance” are desirable and useful for users.
Determine users’ willingness to allow Spotify to access location services, and interest levels and likelihood of using the new feature.
Observe pain points during user tasks. Look for design details or navigation features overlooked or misused by user due to poor branding integration.
Analysis of Findings
Key Takeaways
Test results show 100% of users willing to allow Spotify to access location services while the app is in use. 100% of users also feel the “Nearby” feature makes sense in the Your Library panel.
87.5% of users rated a high to medium likelihood of using the feature in their daily life.
The top four purposes quoted for using the feature are listed as the following — all align with the feature’s intentions:
Identifying music while out at an establishment.
Discovering new music.
Continuing or recreating a positive experience from an activity such as bar, yoga, etc. at home.
Exploring the neighborhood.
Problem: All users would like to be able to revisit playlists discovered through “Nearby” feature.
Solution: Add “Recently Explored” category in “Nearby” feature.
06 Conclusion
Reflection
Next steps
Reflection
Social Impact
The feature’s purpose is to help Spotify users gain awareness of their neighborhood’s offerings in activities and services, and encourage them to partake in the local culture through exploring business-curated playlists. Small businesses can hone a different, immersive form of interaction with the public, and maintain an “online” presence without pressure of consistent, aggressive self-promotion. Instead of linking social media accounts and promoting cross-posts, I wanted my solution to bring the Spotify experience from the screen to real life. Music becomes a sense of rapport between the two groups. There are also the obvious traveling benefits, as music abroad is often in other languages and can be hard to identify.
Next Steps
Further research to optimize information architecture for activity categories.
Further user research and testing to gauge more “Discover by” interests.
Android interface roll-out and user testing.
