Spotify: Adding a Social Feature

User Researcher | Interaction Designer | UX/UI Designer | User testing

Background: Launched in 2008, Spotify is “the largest driver of revenue to the music business today.” With a focus on artist royalties, playlist cultivation, and a seamless experience across devices, it’s no wonder Spotify is the most popular music streaming service in the world. With over 180 million users, how can Spotify create a more connected and social user base?

Challenge: Conceptualize and design the implementation of a new social feature to encourage enhanced user engagement and connectivity.

Outcome: Developing a social Broadcasting feature, allowing users to share their active listening or curate a playlist to be broadcast to friends, while also promoting Similar Friends and making friends’ interests more accessible.

Process

Research & Discovery: Conducted competitive analysis and interviews to develop user persona, creating an empathy map to further empathy and user-centered design and help generate ideas

Define, Ideate & Strategize: Brainstormed new ideas, conducted an app audit to evaluate the current architecture and built an app map where the new features could be added into the existing framework

Interaction Design: Created user flow to develop interactions and navigation, drew low-fidelity sketches, and built high-fidelity wireframes using Spotify’s current branding

User Testing: Conducted usability test to validate features and navigation, creating a prototype to test and an affinity map of the results

UI Design: Applied Spotify’s visual brand to the new social features, created a style tile and UI kit for ease of implementation

To begin to develop and design a new social feature for Spotify, it was essential to gain deeper insight into how users are currently interacting with other users or sharing music, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the current music streaming landscape and other social offering from other major platforms. To do this, some research was in order.

Methodologies

Generative Research:

• Competitive Analysis - To determine each brand’s competitive offering and differentiators

• Market research - To evaluate the overall industry, market, demographics, and users

• App Audit - To evaluate the current offerings, advantages, and disadvantages of Spotify

Primary Research:

• 1:1 User Interviews - To engage directly with users to learn more about their behaviors and needs when using Spotify in context

Competitive Analysis

Market Research

Music Streaming now accounts for 65% of all recorded music revenue. It is frequently hailed as saving the music industry after years of declining sales of physical music. There are now over 1 billion streaming users globally, with the largest market being the US. While streaming has received some criticism from artists due to concerns over poor revenue share and copyright, it remains the largest and fastest growing segment of the music industry.

Insights

• Streaming now accounts for 65% of all recorded music revenue

• 54% of consumers say playlists are replacing albums in their listening habits

• 50% of all listening on Spotify is to playlists

• Nearly 60% of consumers create their own playlist, with almost a third of consumers sharing their playlists with others

• 72% of Spotify listeners are Millenials

• 55% of Spotify users link their Facebook account

App Audit

I conducted an App Audit of the current Spotify app to gain a deeper understanding into its current experience, offerings, and usability.

Interview Key Findings

• 4 out of 5 interviewees enjoyed creating playlists for themselves or others

• All 5 used Spotify’s algorithm to discover new music, relying on autoplay suggestions, Daily Mix, Release Radar, Discover Weekly, and Spotify curated playlists

• Users “really like Spotify”. They cited everything from the algorithms and playlists, to cost and reliability, and integrations into systems like Alexa Dot and Sonos.

• Users listen “all the time” from setting the alarm clock to stream, to listening in the shower, their commute, and all day at work, they stream for 3-10 hours per day.

• All 5 were paying subscribers to only Spotify

• 2 interviewees used family subscriptions, 2 more cited it as something they wanted but just hadn’t done yet

• All used multiple devices to access, typically Desktop and Mobile

Empathy Map

To help synthesize the interviews, I created an Empathy Map, taking the salient and repeated statements from users to help understand their pains, needs, and thoughts around Spotify.

Persona

Based on the insights uncovered by interviews, I created a User Persona. The Persona “Greg” helps keep the primary user as the focus of the design.

Research Conclusions

Spotify has a strong, dedicated following among its users, but there’s very little interaction between people using it. Users feel that music is very personal and are very deliberate with what they choose to share. Most don’t feel the need to connect socially with their friends through Spotify, but they are interested in collaborating or learning more about if people are listening to similar things they are.

Defining the Design Problem

After conducting Interviews and understanding the user, the next step is to gain deeper insight into the problem itself to create a path to an ideal solution. I created a Point of View and How Might We table, taking the insights and needs discovered in research and turning them into statements and questions to use as a brainstorming tool.

Brainstorming

With these How Might We questions to begin generating solutions to the user needs, I led a brainstorming session with the goal of creating a new social feature.

Product Roadmap

Based on the solutions created in the brainstorming session, I created a Product Roadmap to help guide the solutions into planning and implementation. The primary solution is to create a Broadcast, where users can broadcast their current listening or generate curated playlists or DJ sets to share live with friends.

App map

Next, I created an App Map to integrate the new features into the current architecture of the Spotify app and ecosystem, referencing the App Audit to understand the current infrastructure and ideal placement of new features.

User Flow

Now that the information architecture and needs of the feature have been determined, I needed to ensure the ease of use of the new Broadcast feature. Using the App Map, I created a User Flow to understand the entry points of the user and the myriad ways they might desire to access the new feature.

Lo-Fidelity Wireframes

Planning out the design of the new feature, I sketched the main screens that would need to be fully designed and wireframed.

High Fidelity Wireframes

Maintaining the Spotify design and branding, I designed the pages necessary to create a broadcast, listen to a broadcast, and find similar friends in Sketch.

Prototype

Using the wireframes created in Sketch, I created an InVision interactive prototype to test the flow and ease of use of the new feature.

Usability Testing

Testing Goals: 

• Assess the usability and functionality of the feature within the navigation and hierarchy of the Spotify mobile app.

• Test the flow of the feature within the app’s architecture and design, and determine if users can easily and efficiently understand the feature and accomplish tasks.

• Observe users’ behaviors and note any areas of hesitation, disorientation, frustration, etc.

Testing Results:

• Completion Rate: 100%

• Error-Free Rate: 75%

Affinity Map

Style Tile

Since the Spotify branding already exists, it was important to understand the overall look and feel of the design to maintain consistency in creating the new Broadcast feature. I created a Style Tile to help capture the current branding and the essential style elements of the new features.

UI Kit

Once the new features were implemented, I created a UI Kit to have a consistent document of all of the essential UI Elements that will need repeated use in fleshing out the full functionality of the features.

Project Takeaways

Because the friend features are buried in the current Spotify ecosystem, most people don’t use the app to connect with others, but I don’t think this means that people don’t want to use it to do so. While it was difficult to find a creative solution to connect users via the app, the majority of testers didn’t feel like the Broadcast or the Suggested Friends were incongruous with their Spotify experience, and naturally flowed within the app. I believe this means that Spotify can absolutely be used as a social tool to help users share their musical interests with each other and build these connections through shared music. Music is universal, and something individuals and cultures inherently desire to share. Spotify can use it’s powerful music algorithm to further connections between friends and help people discover new friends, new interests, and new music.

What Comes Next for the Spotify feature?

Add more functionality and continue to fully develop the Broadcast feature

Promote connectivity through user interactions. Currently, users rarely interact with each other through the Spotify app, so they aren’t sure where to even access these features. A branding push or PR campaign to encourage these connections would go a long way toward increasing engagement, with the addition of easier access to friend features. I believe users should be “friends” with everyone in their contact list, and be empowered to choose who to follow based on similarities.

Continue Iteration, Implementation, and Testing

Spotify