CASE STUDY: SPOTIFY
SPOTIFY STORIES
CHALLENGE: Spotify has democratized access to music. It is a pioneer in creating highly personalized playlists. It is redefining how people discover music and socializing the music streaming industry. I’m designing a story feature for Spotify to increase social engagement with the app.
SKILLS: UI/UX Design, UX Research, Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Procreate, Product Strategy
PAINPOINTS: As an avid user of Spotify, I’ve often found difficult to connect with friends on the app. While I can see what people are listening via the Friends Activity section (which is only available on the Desktop version), I’m curious about their suggestions or commentaries. Unless I actively search my friends’ profiles, I’m unable to see their curated playlists. I wish there is an minimal-effort way to discover my friends’ new favorite music.
GOALS
- Increase user time on the Spotify app
- Increase engagement on Friends Activity section and social interaction
- Improve / broaden ways to discover new music
UX RESEARCH
I had several conversations with my friends / Spotify users to better understand:
- how they discover music and curate playlists
- what they value in the current Spotify experience - i.e. My Year Wrapped, Daylists, Daily Mixes
- their frustrations / painpoints
AFFINITY BOARD
TAKEAWAYS
-
People seek Spotify not only for streaming but to discover music
- Users are curious about what their friends are listening to and enjoy observing the Friend Activity feature
- There must be a more seamless way to discover friend profiles and their listening suggestions
EXPLORATORY WIREFRAMES
HOME PAGE REDESIGN
The new mobile home page will have a Friends Activity section on the top of the page, showing friends’ listening activity and stories posted. By pulling the screen down, users can refresh stories.
Inspired by the Instagram stories, I used green color to indicate active listening story (within 24hr) and grey color to indicate past listening story
STORY POP-UP PAGE
Pop-up when user click on a friend’s listening story - it will show the time since story was posted and listening activity. Option to add a captionmmentary about the song
SHARING OPTION EXPERIENCE
Users will be able to share a song to their stories by clicking on the “share” option for a song and then clicking the added Spotify Story feature
USER PROFILE PAGE
On the user profile section, an active listening story will show up around the profile picture indicated by a green circle
CONCLUSION
Through this case study, I found out that many people around me share similar frustrations with the Spotify experience. We tend to adhere to repetitive listening habits and switch between ready-made playlists. Discovering new music requires more effort than it should, and we become bored of playing the same music on loop.
I sought to create a more engaging and vibrant experience for the Spotify mobile app, where friends can connect on new music and cultivate more dynamic listening experiences.
NEXT STEPS
I would pursue the following steps to test the success of the new story feature:
- Get feedback from users on how to improve this experience
- Metric tracking and KPIs - i.e. number of songs added or queued from the story feed or increase in user time spent on the mobile app
- A/B testing
- Revise and implement design edits based on user feedback