ADDING A FEATURE TO PERSONALIZE THE MUSIC SHARING EXPERIENCE
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
Spotify is the lead in music streaming right now and they want to stay that way. They want to improve engagement and retention in the streaming music app, so one way they have defined to do this is to expand their social media capabilities. My goal was to provide the best direction for Spotify with this focus.
SCOPE OF WORK
RESEARCH
Competitive Analysis
User Interviews
Focused Research
STRATEGY
User Persona
Empathy Map
Ideation
Storyboarding
UX DESIGN
Wireframes
Prototype
Usability Testing
Design Iteration
UI DESIGN
Visual Design
SUMMARY
To define the problem that needed to be solved by expanding social media capabilities for Spotify, I started by addressing the issue of music sharing; how people define music sharing, Spotify’s role in this and what opportunities and problems exist in terms of music sharing. Spotify currently allows users to easily share music, but what was found was that while streaming music sharing is easy through the app, it is not as personal or special as some users may like when creating a special playlist for someone or as a group.
Through user interviews, research, creating a problem statement, creative exploration, storyboarding, user testing and iteration, a personalization feature was created to address the problem of “how might we create a more personalized music sharing experience.” Users tested the feature and gave feedback. This feedback was utilized to refine and make this feature better. Many users felt they would use it, if Spotify were add it as a feature.
PROCESS
Research
Research began with competitive analysis to see what the industry currently offered. Then, user interviews were conducted to find out how people defined music sharing.
Through user interviews, commonalities emerged on needs and pain points in regards to sharing music. The users needs included a fast and easy way to share music, a way to create playlists and share and a way to connect with others through music. A common pain point found with these users was that digital music sharing, while easy, did not feel as personal or special when a user wants to create a playlist for a special occasion or another person. Some of these users referred to decorating a CD or tape case in years past, and how this made the sharing of music feel more personal or special.
“Sharing music digitally just feels less special. I wish there was a way to make it a little more personal.”
From user interview findings, there were opportunities uncovered; to create more meaningful and more personal music sharing experiences, utilizing the well-designed and simple Spotify user interface to give clear user feedback.
STRATEGY
From user interviews, a persona was created to capture the person for which this new Spotify music sharing feature is designed. Her name is Marcella and connecting with her friends and family is important to her. She loves how easy it is to share music, but just feels that music sharing digitally is not very tangible. She would like to feel a little more special and personalized, and for it to be a way to create a meaningful connection with those she cares about. She would like music sharing to be more meaningful and personal than just the sharing of a simple link.
From user interviews, quotes helped to further understand what our user, Marcella, says, hears, thinks, does and sees. This exercise further helped me understand her needs and to tailor the new feature to fit these needs and remove pain points from her Spotify music sharing experience.
Research ROUND TWO
Opportunities were uncovered through user interviews, creating a user persona and creating an empathy map. From this point, a second round of research was conducted based on these findings. This research investigated music gifting and meaningful connections through music and shared experiences. Subjects explored in this research included gifting music through gift cards and subscriptions, giving physical music such as LPs and online concert subscriptions.
Since the sharing of music can have to do with personal memories and shared experiences as well as self expression, research was conducted on the Instagram Stories feature which allows the sharing of life stories through photography, video, Spotify songs, graphic stickers, GIFs, song lyrics and more. Currently, through Instagram Stories, users can share a song and add text and graphics to it. Some of the songs include animation.
From this second round of research, it was found that the sharing of music and its purpose has a wide range - from completing a simple function of sharing a song to sharing a memory or an experience to create a personal, emotional connection. But, when it comes to making music sharing more meaningful and personal, the users tested weren’t necessarily looking for “a gift” but instead are looking for the personal connection and the feeling that people share specifically relating to music, which can be shared experience, a memory or self expression. Spotify fulfills the user need to make music sharing easy, but there is an opportunity to make this sharing of music more personal and meaningful.
IDEATION
From the second round of research, a problem statement was created. “How might we make the Spotify music sharing experience more personal and meaningful?” From this problem statement, a process called Crazy 8s was utilized in the ideation phase. For five minutes, every 40 seconds, a rough thumbnail sketch was created to get ideas flowing quickly, without getting into an detail about any one thing. This allowed as many ideas and perspectives to be flushed out on “how to make music sharing more personal.” This process was repeated five times with rest breaks in between every five minute session.
“How might we make the Spotify music sharing experience more personal and meaningful?”
From these ideation sessions, slightly tighter sketches were created to define the strongest ideas that addressed our user needs.
Once a few solid ideas bubbled up from this process, a storyboard and user flow was created that addressed the problem of how to make music sharing more personalized.
UX DESIGN
From the storyboard, tighter sketches were created to follow in creating a Spotify Personalized Music Sharing prototype.
UI DESIGN
To create the Spotify personalized music sharing prototype, screenshots were modified and redesigned to include this new personalization feature which would allow users to personalize playlist and song covers with GIFs, animated elements, stickers, text and patterning.
Users were recorded as they clicked through the Spotify app with the new personalization feature. From these recordings, notes were taken, and commonalities were found on what they felt was confusing and what they felt was working well. I found that creating an affinity map helped me to easily see the overlap in user needs. This gave me a clear path on what needed to be adjusted to make an even more effective and useful personalized music sharing experience. The most common feedback was that they found it very simple and easy to use and that it was very intuitive. Users were also surprised that this feature did not already exist. Pain points included not knowing this was a new feature, that the Famous Quote sticker was not clear and that users were confused when a photo gallery did not appear when the photo icon was clicked.
A second iteration was made to the personalized music sharing feature based on the user testing feedback collected. Graphic elements and simple instruction was added to clearly show users that there was a new personalization feature on the Spotify app. Graphics that were not easily readable were replaced with more readable ones and an expected gallery was added for when the user clicked on the add a photo icon.
REFLECTION
It was inspiring to find that, no matter the success of a design, such as Spotify, there are almost always ways to add improvements to address user needs. The best ways to do this is by asking questions, learning from user feedback, defining a problem from this feedback, researching what currently exists and ideating and exploring how a user problem might be solved. From there, we can get direct user feedback on these potential solutions to make a “solution” fit the user need even more closely. What I learned from this project is to keep asking questions on how we might make something that is already successful even better at solving a user need. With an open mind and unrestricted exploration, user feedback can direct and focus our path to creating useful experiences.
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