Adding a social Feature to Spotify

Spotify wants to improve engagement and retention in the app. In order to do that, they want to expand on their social capabilities.

Using tools such as pen and paper, Sketch, and InVision my role was to conduct user research, user interviews, create personas, identify a successful user flow, and finally create a high-fidelity mobile prototype of the features I’d be adding, integrated seamlessly within the rest of the app, to be used in user testing.

CONTEXT & CHALLENGE

Background

Spotify, leader on streaming music, wants to make a move into helping the connection between humans and music further.

It’s important to note that Spotify doesn’t have the ambition of being the next social network where you share your holiday pictures and miscellaneous selfies. Any new social capability should be in favor of human - and even better, emotional - connection, primarily centered around music.

PROCESS AND INSIGHTS

Research

The research for this project began with competitor analysis and provisional personas. These helped me get a grasp on the current industry practices and set the tone for my first round of interviews with music listeners.

I conducted 6 in-person interviews regarding listening habits and sharing habits of music, specifically online. The interviewees were all between the ages of 18-25 and either currently or recently enrolled as college students. I used questions focused on identifying current listening habits, what tools people use to listen to music, how people typically share music, and any negative or positive experiences they have associated with those practices. I noticed a lot of discussion focused around the disconnect between online social music experiences and in-person social music experiences, so for my second round of interviews I focused my discussions on identifying problems with in-person sharing experiences.

In my second round, most mentioned that they typically play the song out loud for the person they’re sharing it with and discuss the song afterwards. Most also said they don’t really know if anyone is following through with a download, but would be interested to know. Sharing seems to be a personal activity for them that only happens with close friends or family in private conversation. Many of them mentioned feeling as though they don’t have much time anymore to listen to music.

After the second round of research, I was able to use the information collectively to create a persona to help me build empathy with my users. I also spent time trying to picture the day-to-day life of my persona character, how she was feeling in general, and about the lack of music in her life. When I got stuck, I used the 5 Why’s technique and it helped me get even deeper in my empathy map.

Ideation

After those first few steps, I took a look at the problems identified in my research and created a list of problem statements to consider during my ideation exercises. A few problems stood out:

• When people share songs, sometimes they’re not able to listen there and then.

• Spotify links aren’t always handy on mobile

• Discovery of songs they wish to share depends on timing, and is more in the moment

From these I was able to come up with a key problem statement.

Focusing on this statement in particular, I ran a Crazy 8s exercise to generate a wide variety of solutions to my challenge. I came up with about 30 ideas, of which three in particular stood out:

1. A feature identifying songs you had heard in the background throughout the day.

2. A convenient share menu appearing when you take a screenshot of something in the app, leading to more link-backs to Spotify instead of inconvenient screenshots.

3. A way to listen in-sync and create a shared queue with a friend.

I used the same exercise format to rapidly storyboard these three ideas. I decided to move forward with the “heard today” and the screenshot features. Luckily, I had mostly drawn key screens in my storyboards and was able to use these to come up with a user flow for my feature addition.

Wireframes & Prototyping

Using the tools from my research and ideation phases, I downloaded a Spotify UI kit and used Sketch to quickly create high-fidelity wireframes of the screens identified in my user flow. After a quick feedback session with my DesignLab mentor, I iterated with some quick revisions and used the Craft plugin to upload and create a high-fidelity mobile prototype in InVision.

Using this prototype, I organized usability testing and made priority revisions to the wireframes and prototype. You can run through my prototype below! On your created playlist, you can double click to emulate taking a screenshot.

SUMMARY

I loved learning about new ideation methods during this project. Challenging myself to rapidly ideate without getting attached to bad ideas from the start was super helpful. Given more time, I would have liked to employ more usability testing after my revisions to make sure the solutions I implemented were successful. I’d be interested to see if there’s a better way to deal with the “location access” issue uncovered during the on boarding process, and if the microcopy changes I made helped the user understand the end results any more than before.