Skills:
Vinyl. Boomboxes. Walkmen. CD players. MP3 players. Pandora. YouTube. SoundCloud. iTunes. Spotify. Spotify has synthesized some of the key aspects spanning decades of listening to music into one service, where users can find, organize, and listen to music they love; discover new music; and share their listening inclinations with friends and the general public. One thing it doesn’t highlight: the social aspect of listening to music. For this design project, I was tasked to design a social feature for the Spotify music app.
Research, Audits, Interviews & More
I first performed usability audits on Spotify and other social media apps like Instagram, Reddit and Discord to understand how content sharing and community features were implemented across platforms. I highlighted specific pain and bright points to understand what created a positive user experience.
Working in a team of three, I then conducted user interviews to learn more about how user's interact with their music app. From these interviews, we learned that:
- users appreciated music discovery tools such as artist radios and mixes.
- users like hearing others' opinions on songs.
- interviewees are tired of the overuse of AI.
With this new information about Spotify's users. I created numerous "How Might We" statements to brainstorm ways I could implement a new social feature. I decided to put my focus into creating a feature that allows users to discover new music curated by other real users, not by an AI or algorithm.
I then created a user persona to capture the goals and needs of a potential user of the app.
Early Ideation and Prototyping
I got to work creating paper prototypes and sketched out my ideas on a tablet. I tried seeing how comments might work, a redesigned search page, and user communities full of related playlists. I decided to focus on the last idea, creating spaces where users can share their own playlists and music for others to discover.
With the first prototype complete, I then conducted usability audits to test my designs. From these audits, I learned that the user flow for searching communities was not intuitive. I was able to take this criticism and use it to improve upon these designs the next iteration.
After hearing feedback from my peers and making edits to my designs, I created a low-fidelity prototype to better visualize the final prototype. I then went through another round of usablity testing to further polish the flow.
To implement a new feature into Spotify's existing UI, it was crucial to match the brands color, type, and design patterns. Working with two peers, we analyzed the UI components of Spotify to create a sheet of colors that we could reference in our designs. A type analysis was also conducted to match the style and size ratio of Spotify's existing typeface.
Final Prototype
The final high-fidelity prototype illustrates how a social feature in Spotify might look. My new feature, Spotify Communities, is a place to share, discover, and join communities with playlists created and curated by real music lovers.
The Pitch
The last part was making a pitch deck to share my work. Using Figma, I created an animated and dynamic presentation that aligned with the company's visual identity.
