SPOTIFY REDESIGN
Integrating social experiences into music
OVERVIEW: Redesigned Spotify to include profile pages that allow the user to highlight their recent and all-time favorite artists, albums, and songs to their social network.
TOOLS/SKILLS: Figma, UI/UX Design, Product Strategy, User Research
TEAM: Sole contributor
TIMELINE: 5 weeks
Overview
BUSINESS PROBLEM
Spotify is generally popular with students, but we are not fully realizing the potential to monetize them. 20% of college-age students who are on Spotify are not on the Premium plan (per project prompt).
USER PROBLEM
Spotify users struggle to find direct ways to share music with peers through Spotify’s available features.
CHALLENGE
Increasing growth in new Student Premium accounts.
How might we leverage user-to-user engagement to promote social music discovery on Spotify?
OUTCOME
Spotify profile pages that allow the user to highlight their recent and all-time favorite artists, albums, and songs to their social network.
Note: This was done for a class, and we did not officially partner with Spotify.
Problem Space
USERS
College students in the NA region. They are:
frequent listeners
have highly connected social graphs
have high pop-cultural awareness
have highest engagement
WHY FOCUS ON SOCIAL SHARE?
Social sharing is very common with college students, but Spotify is not directly capturing this value as engagement on our platform.
User Research
To understand how Spotify users utilizes existing social features and share music, I conducted interviews with 3 participants. As an Apple Music user, I also did my own product research by using Spotify Premium and toying around with its social features.
From my research, I identified the 2 key pain points that will serve as a North Star for my solution.
II. USER PROFILES ARE LACKLUSTER
Currently, profiles display the user’s playlists and follower counts. While a profile can give insight into the user’s music taste through playlists, it doesn’t fully represent the user.
How might we allow a user to express themselves more through their profile page?
I. SHARING RECENT FAVORITES
Users have days, weeks, or months where they love listening to a specific artist, album, or song. Music sharing typically happens with these recent favorites.
How might we allow users to easily view their peers’ recent favorites?
Ideation
When thinking about a social feature, I couldn’t help but think about social media trends like Spotify Wrapped and the Bill Clinton Swag meme, which have been used to showcase one’s favorite music.
Spotify Wrapped: an annual recap of a user’s music listening activity throughout the year
Bill Clinton Swag: a meme featuring Bill Clinton sitting on the floor with vinyl albums, which users can customize to their own music preferences
Low-fi Prototypes
To address user insights, I redesigned Spotify profile pages to allow the user to highlight their recent and all-time favorite music to their social network. The following features were included:
I. WEEKLY QUESTIONS
A question that prompts a song as an answer.
II. FEATURED MUSIC
Any music that you want to highlight on your profile page, whether that be your song of the day or album of the week.
III. LISTENING TO
Artists, albums, and songs that you have been loving recently, based on listening activity tracked by Spotify.
IV. ALL-TIME FAVORITES
The artists, albums, and songs you will never get tired of.
Interaction Design
I also consider user flows and interactions when selecting music to highlight on the page. Two key usability heuristics influenced my design: consistency & standards (I) and visibility of system status (II).
I. EXISTING FLOWS FOR MUSIC SELECTION
To maintain consistency with Spotify’s design system, I wanted to adopt their music-adding flow, as seen in adding songs in playlists.
II. BULK-POPULATING MUSIC
For example, this may happen when the user wants to input 3 artists in one go. In this case, the user should have an updated status of the artists they have already selected as they continue searching for more to add.
Prioritization
Given time constraint and project scope, I aired down my solution as described below:
ADDING “RECENT FAVORITES”
To eliminate overlap between “Featured Music” and “Listening To,” I fused the two ideas together to create “Recent Favorites,” which the user will manually input.
REMOVING WEEKLY QUESTIONS
While weekly questions were a fun way for Spotify users to engage with their profiles on a regular basis, this feature seemed more like nice-to-have rather than a necessity.
Next Steps
If I had more time to work on this redesign, I would test my idea with users to gain feedback on usability and the overall product. I want to see if this product would actually increase social presence on Spotify and increase conversion to Student Premium plans.
Additionally, I would add the “Weekly Question” feature that was scrapped. This would prompt users to engage with profiles more regularly, adding the fun to in-app socializing.
Final Thoughts
This project taught me how to execute elegant designs through Figma with auto-layout, design systems, and interactions.
In a broader UI/UX sense, I’ve learned to justify design & implementation choices and increased my confidence in system-level thinking for user interfaces.