Project Brief
August - October 2022
Add a Feature Capstone - UX Academy
*I am in no way affiliated with Spotify. This is a concept project.*
Background:
Adding a feature to Spotify, a product that millions of people already use, is a more complicated task than it may seem, given that the design team has already thought about hundreds, maybe thousands, of features to implement over the years and have chosen the best ones to carry out. My task for this project was to do exactly that and I wanted to make sure I was staying true to the UX process by tapping into what users would want from Spotify, instead of tapping into my own biases and ideas of what would be a good fit for it.
Spotify’s mission statement is ‘to unlock the potential of human creativity - by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it.' Their primary mission is to facilitate human creativity by allowing artists to share their work with fans. Given this, I narrowed my ideas for research and design down to this:
Spotify should focus on expanding the social aspect of their product, by making it easier for their users to share, collaborate on, and enjoy music.
The exact feature I wanted to add still had to be decided and I wanted to go to the users to find out what they want, therefore my research goals were as follows:
Research Goal:
Conduct user research to determine the most useful feature to add that would allow users to share and be inspired by other people’s music.
Research Objectives:
- Understand what makes Spotify unique from other music streaming platforms right now.
- Understand what improvements users want to see in Spotify.
- Identify the needs, pain points, goals, and motivations of Spotify users.
- Identify how users share music from Spotify currently.
Methodologies
User Interviews
Competitive Analysis User Survey
User Interviews
Competitive Analysis/Secondary Research
Based on research, I determined three of Spotify's biggest competitors to be Apple Music, Youtube Music, and SoundCloud.
I focused on the social media and sharing aspects of these three competitors.
SoundCloud
- 250 million tracks (largest collection of songs of any platform) and 175 million users
- unique social features such as commenting on specific parts of songs, and a built-in messaging system which allows users to send songs to other users.
- user profiles allow others see likes, uploads, and comments which gives a sense of the social aspect that SoundCloud was hoping to achieve.
Apple Music
- narrowly tops Spotify's collection of professional uploads.
- shares many of Spotify's social features such as user profiles, the 'Friends Are Listening to' feature, and allowing users to follow friends to name a few.
- Apple Music's integration within the Apple ecosystem gives it an edge among iPhone and other Apple product users.
Youtube Music
- a paid service provided by Youtube that allows users to watch and download ad-free videos and playlists.
- Youtube is the biggest video streaming platform, and for that reason the amount of traffic they get for music is greater than any other music streaming platform.
- Youtube Music does not host many social features within their product, but allows users to easily copy and send links to others.
User Survey
- I surveyed 15 people, most of whom were frequent and long time users of Spotify to hear about some of their grievances, opinions, and interactions on the app.
Most commonly used features:
- copying and sending links to friends/family
- adding songs to queue/playlists
- searching for songs/playlists
- looking at friend activity
- creating playlists
Main Research Findings:
- Users were more likely to discover music through family/friends sending them songs, as well as song suggestion features from Spotify.
- Users mainly shared music by copying and sending links to songs on third party social media. During interviews, I found that this was a frustrating process that took more steps than was desirable.
Feature to Add
Streamline the user flow when wanting to share a song with friends by creating an in-app sharing system where users could send a song to people they mutually follow.
User Flows
Paper Wireframes
During the prototyping phase, I started off by creating paper wireframes and brainstorming different iterations of the pages that I wanted to create.
Lo-fidelity Wireframes
Hi-fidelity Wireframes + Prototype
Working Prototype
