Spotify Concept: Sharing the Music You Love With the People You Love
What sets Spotify apart from its competitors is its ability to analyze its users’ listening habits, generating playlists and music suggestions based on the genres and artists one listens to regularly. However, with technology in charge of such song predictions, the plethora of recommendations is often repetitive and inaccurate. Simply put, algorithms cannot understand people’s music tastes as well as those who know the true you.
Introducing: Sharing Music with Followers
How It All Began
When I initially noticed an area of improvement within Spotify, I immediately began brainstorming new features to implement before uncovering the root problem. I was adamant about developing engagement among followers and making the social aspect more prevalent. However, this wasn’t necessarily an issue with the app. In fact, by turning Spotify into a more mainstream social media platform, it would take away from its values as an app — to explore and share music with the world. If anything other than music was available on the app, it would become just another Instagram.
In this case, I was focused on expanding Spotify rather than solving a problem with Spotify. I had to change my trajectory.
So, in order to truly get to the root problem, I conducted interviews on three different types of Spotify users.
Understanding How People Use Spotify And Discover Music They Love
The goals of my interviews were to 1) understand how everyday users predominantly use the app, and 2) how they typically find the music they enjoy listening to. Here were my main findings:
- People see no need to use social features within the app.
“I rarely visit my profile page; I kind of forgot about it honestly.”
“The app opens right to my library so why would I go to my profile just to access the same music.”
2. People find songs they enjoy the most through friends or word-of-mouth
“My friends and I have similar music tastes so I tend to scroll through their playlists a lot.”
“When my friends are playing a song I like I’ll ask them about it and add it to my library.”
3. People find it hard to organize music their friends share with them
“More often than not I’ll forget the name of a song my friends show me.”
“Sometimes I have to dig deep into my phone to find a song my friend sent me a while ago to listen to.”
The findings from these two interview goals allowed me to understand what people prioritize when listening to music, and how I can facilitate this process to improve the users’ experience with Spotify. People didn’t think that Spotify needed to expand upon its social features, as they were content with using the app for their own music-listening purposes. However, there is still a disconnect between users discovering music they resonate most with on the app and organizing recommendations from outside sources.
How people currently exchange music
Discovering this disconnect in the music suggestion process finally brought me to the root People Problem:
People want to share music and discover songs that align with their music taste, but they can’t do that well because:
1. Spotify’s music suggestions don’t pertain to people’s music tastes as much as their friend’s suggestions do
2. It’s hard to keep track of music suggestions from friends because they come from different sources
Brainstorming Solutions
Now that I had gotten to the bottom of the problem, I could start thinking of ways to solve it. I recruited two of my friends Maddie Cho and Kailey Brecher to help me iterate through and aggregate potential features I could implement in Spotify that are geared toward solving my People Problem.
Solutions
From this brainstorming session, we distilled 6 individual solutions that could potentially fulfill this problem within Spotify:
- See which of your followers liked which songs on the app
- Make your liked songs playlist public to your followers
- Make your top songs and genres public to your followers on your profile
- Make the songs you are currently listening to public to your followers
- Your friends can send you song suggestions through the app
- Organize the songs suggested by Spotify and your friends on a separate page
The key is that these solutions don’t take away from any of the current listening features on Spotify, as individuals who are not interested in using the feature can continue to use the app as they please.
I then analyzed each of these features in terms of their feasibility and impact. After weighing the pros and cons of their implementation, I decided on the feature I felt directly and most efficiently solved my people problem:
Song sharing among followers
This feature would provide a new way for individuals to share music with each other on the platform, which revolves around Spotify’s core value as an app. By centralizing a place for followers to send each other suggestions rather than suggestions just being from the app’s algorithm, users will have a better time finding music they enjoy when it comes from their friends.
But How Did I Get Here?
Before deciding on this feature as the solution, I first had to take a step back and weigh all of the different approaches to solving this problem. How can I improve the user’s music-listening experience through song sharing without diverting from Spotify’s values?
Drawing Inspiration — How Individuals Share Content Within Other Platforms
One thing that sets Spotify apart from other social media platforms is the lack of communication that followers can have with each other. Music revolves around the user, rather than users revolving around each other. When speech becomes an available feature on a platform, conversations unrelated to the content can occur, as well as other complications with certain language. With this in mind, I decided to eliminate this possibility when brainstorming a DM-like feature for song sending within Spotify to keep messaging focused on the music.
Setting the Wheels in Motion: Low-Fidelity Sketches
I began to brainstorm what my song-sharing solution would like as a feature within the app. Drawing from the inspiration I distilled from other platforms, I sketched various explorations and ultimately focused on the ones below.
- Sharing music: Followers can choose to send a song through the song’s main page, then select a follower(s) to send that song to.
- Song reactions: After receiving and listening to a song suggestion, users can react to that song in the thread with an icon that best describes how they felt about the song. This would replace a texting feature, ensuring that conversation unrelated to music does not occur.
- Grand suggestion list: This page would compile and sort all of the songs a follower has received so they can easily find the music they have been suggested.
Where would this feature fit within Spotify’s current structure?
Based on Spotify’s existing structure, I created an information hierarchy which mapped where my song-sending feature would best fit in with the app. The purple represents the pages and features that currently exist within Spotify, and the blue represents tentative areas that my feature would fit in with the app’s structure.
Determining Message Organization for Music Recommendations
I then brainstormed multiple ways in which sending and receiving song recommendations could be seamlessly communicated among followers. I created medium-fidelity mockups of these ideas and analyzed the pros and cons of each page’s available options and format.
User Testing
To help me figure out which features’ pros outweigh their cons, I tested these explorations out on a few users to investigate their experience with each. After observing their use with each feature, I decided to move forward with Option B. Option B seemed to be the most intuitive, efficient, and visually appealing solution, maximizing the ability for users to send and receive songs. Additionally, it made the most logical sense based on the app’s current structure.
I started building out these features more, creating flows of various explorations of my feature.
UI Kit
I created a UI Kit for the visual design aspects of my feature.
Final Solution
After a few obstacles, tweaks, and hours of design, I arrived at the final prototype for my feature. Not only does this feature provide a direct solution to my People Problem, it also stays aligned with Spotify’s values as an app.
Conclusion — A Crash Course
As a creative person who had previously focused on studio work such as painting, drawing, and digital media, I was eager to find a way to merge my artistic and technological passions. Discovering and entering the world of product design has been such an exciting process for me as I have finally found a way to apply my visual design and critical-thinking skills to the digital realm.
I am extremely grateful for this experience and feel very fortunate to have worked alongside incredibly dedicated and intelligent students. This process has taught me the importance of trial and error and seeking feedback in a creative setting, as designing is a challenging and often overwhelming process. However, it has simultaneously been a liberating and rewarding experience finding an outlet that has given me a foundation for my future endeavors.
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This is an independent UX case study for the semester-long project in Intro to Digital Product Design at Cornell University. I am in no way affiliated with Spotify.
I am a junior at Cornell University majoring in Information Science and minoring in Fine Arts. I love tackling problems and finding creative solutions to combat issues, using my strong sense of empathy to understand the power of the users’ perspective in problem-solving.
Please feel free to check out my portfolio to view the rest of my creative and design work.
