Challenge

Originally created as a solution to digital media piracy in the early 2000's, Spotify has become the leading music streaming service in the world. Its mission is “to help people listen to whatever music they want, whenever they want, wherever they want – in a completely legal and accessible way.”

Despite Spotify's global success, they know that they need to improve user engagement and retention, especially given the intersection of music and social connection between people. Past attempts at leveraging that need haven't been very successful – so, the question remains, what's missing?

‍Project objectives:

• Conduct research to identify opportunities for new features in Spotify's mobile app
  
• Prioritize and design the features that cater to target users' needs, while fulfilling business objectives
  
• Maintain consistency between new designs and Spotify's existing UI

‍The project and content presented here are speculative and for educational purposes only; I am not affiliated with Spotify

Outcome

A high-fidelity prototype of Spotify with these new features, integrated seamlessly with the app's existing design.

Process

Phase 1: Research

Secondary Research

I kicked off the project by learning more about Spotify's positioning in the music streaming industry. Through market research, I also uncovered challenges that Spotify faces when designing social engagement features. We can see that building a strong user base is essential for any social feature or app.

Spotify Challenges

• Platform Sharing - Music sharing is difficult when friends are using different streaming platforms.
  
• Engagement/incentive - Without a compelling reason users might not share at all.
  
• Integration - Finding a way to integrate a social feature into the existing design.

Highlights from market research

These challenges helped shape the questions I asked later on during user interviews.
Based on theses findings, I concluded that the users I needed to interview would need to be:

• Spotify premium users who use the app at least 3-4 times per week.
  
• Millennials or college students
  

Primary Research

I conducted 3 separate interviews with Spotify premium users who have all been using the app for over a year. Read the full interview guide and notes here.

I then created a persona with this information – a guideline for the product development and marketing processes that follow.

User persona highlighting goals, needs, frustrations, and motivations.

Phase 2: Define

Using the information gathered from the research phase I was able to define the design problem for Spotify.
Design a new social feature that embeds within the current Spotify platform that will increase user engagement and incentives users to share music with each other.

Phase 3: Ideate

I brainstormed a handful of ideas on how to go about solving the problem for Spotify and came up with sharing feature that includes a space where you are able to talk with each other about the different songs and playlist being shared.

Phase 4: Design

With the new feature selected, I then created a user flow to determine where to place each feature.

Phase 5: Prototype

Though I could have created a low- or mid-fidelity prototype to test out the new features, I decided to create a high-fidelity prototype that matched Spotify's existing UI design. This allows users to give feedback during usability testing on whether those new features fit in with the overall Spotify experience. With a low/mid-fidelity prototype, they may focus too much energy on imagining/remembering what everything looks like in the actual Spotify app.

After testing the prototype with five participants, I began to see patterns in their reactions and feedback.
I then translated those insights into design recommendations and revised my prototype.

Phase 6: Iterate