The Brief.
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Sector: Entertainment, music industry
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Challenge: The challenge was a self initiated project to develop some of Spotify’s features. The Spotify team had recently done some website research and their main focus was to improve the Information Architecture. This project was made during Covid-19 quarantine, so we thought it was the perfect time to pitch a new concept - Stay Home Party. As a result we improved some features but Stay Home Party took over to be the main proposal of the research.
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My role: Competitive research, Surveys, Information architecture, UI redesign, Campaign strategy and design.
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Project time: 4 weeks
Here’s a preview of the final design. Please read further down the page about the creation process.
What I did.
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Discovery research
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In the discovery research, I first focused on doing a research of the main competitors: Youtube, Apple Music and Tidal. This produced some interesting findings:
1. Social features: None of the leading streaming services have a fully fleshed out social feature. It appears to be a function that is not expected by users but is appreciated when it is available.
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2. Exclusive content: This seemed to be a major key to attracting users. Platforms aim to show that they can deliver the newest, most unique content before competitors. Exclusive access is used to make users feel “in the know.”
3. Personalization: Most personalization on these apps takes form as curated playlists. While some apps give the user a profile page, there is limited functionality or options for it.
User surveys
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I sent surveys to 10 participants who were Spotify users and did two rounds of research. The first round of questions were about music preferences, and the second round questions were specific to the Spotify app and personalisation user journeys. (Please note that surveys were used because of the Covid-19 lockdown). These were the main findings:
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Respondents found that the Spotify website quite messy, with far too many music options.
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They didn’t understand some of the music categories in Spotify, such as Your Heavy Rotation or Jump Back In.
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Respondents were open to “Made for you” suggestions created by Spotify and based on their music preferences and settings.
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They were keen on the idea of a notifications page, where they could be informed about tickets, social media channels and new releases from their favourite artists and genres.
User persona
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In order to empathize with the key audience, I developed so-called proto-personas, which are based on observations and some assumptions. These serve as a starting point to reflect on the needs and challenges of the user and possible solutions that can be considered later in designing an improved service.
Information Architecture
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Content audit
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To understand the existing site and its content, I ran a content audit listing all available information and features. Based on this, we collectively decided what to keep, what to kick and how content can be integrated into a more intuitive information architecture.
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Sitemap
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Next came the development of a site map, including the core and customisable content for a redesigned home page. In response to survey respondents who felt that there were too many content areas on the Spotify home page, the new home page starts off relatively simple and can be added to by power users of the app.
Design
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Paper prototype for early evaluation
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Now that all the design and planning have been laid out it was time to create wireframe sketches to test with people. This was done with the survey respondents who had agreed to participate in further research.
Validation research
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The main findings from the early validation research with paper prototypes were:
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Participants found it really interesting that Music Settings had been added to the main menu
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Manage Homepage was also very welcomed
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Participants were happy that the main homepage wasn’t cluttered with so many music options
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They gave a thumbs up to the concept of moving the music modules up and down on the page, depending on importance
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Because this case study was made during the Covid-19 lockdown, there were suggestions to create a Stay Home Party, with artists live streaming songs and content.
Final (high fidelity) prototype
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Building on the existing Spotify main design, I added Music Settings, Manage Homepage Notifications and Stay Home Party to the main menu. The first two were developed using the existing Spotify design guidelines and Stay Home Party was created from scratch.
For Stay Home Party, we created a little festival map. Every house on the map has a host and guests (all of them famous artists). There are two possible options when you are at the party:
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You can access one of the houses as a guest and hit play to start the playlist. With this option you can invite other Spotify friends and have a video call while you listen to the playlist on the background.
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Alternatively, you can also join a live streaming Home Party with the host of each party and enjoy the virtual performance.
The result
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Working on this project, I learned that designing a desktop app presents very different challenges to mobile apps. The existing Spotify desktop app had features that weren’t in the Android app for my smartphone.
I was very encouraged by the feedback I received in early research to my sketches for some “see what your friends are playing” functionality, and this developed into the Stay Home Party. Originally a response to the Covid-19 lockdown, this feature has taken on a life of its own.
I contacted Spotify UX Designers through LinkedIn and they gave me very positive feedback about the project
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