BRANDON GIRDLER
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
Spotify: Design Social Feature
Project Background
There is a special connection between humans and music. As a streaming music service, Spotify's mission is clear: "to help people listen to whatever music they want, whenever they want, wherever they want--in a completely legal and accessible way." Spotify has kicked around the idea of "Instagram-like stories" that never really panned out due to low engagement when they tried offering messaging capabilities on their app. Now, with COVID canceling all live shows, Spotify wants to develop a new social feature to provide better engagement for fans and artists. I designed a social communication and streaming feature to do just that.
Research
Market Research
When starting research streaming music, I checked out all of Spotify's current functionality and what they have tried in the past. Once I identified the exact problem we were solving for, I looked at their competitors to see how they address similar issues. I noticed there is very little social engagement in the music streaming market. With little direct competition, I looked to the major players in social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to see how they handle the interactions and functions.
Competitive Analysis
The research from above led me to draw more comparisons from social media companies than Spotify's direct competition. I chose to include both Instagram and Facebook in the competitive analysis along with YouTube Music. Below is a high level breakdown of different types of services offered by all 3 including what I envision as the new features available on Spotify:
User Interviews
Building on information from the competitive analysis, I wanted some perspective from people in the music industry including artists, fans and users. I started by scheduling interviews with 8 people from the music industry here in Nashville. Knowing just how diverse the user pool is for Spotify, I lined up the interviews with the most demographically diverse group of participants as possible. This allowed me to be better informed when designing the feature and more empathetic to a broader breadth of user.
Findings
Artists want to stay relevant by sharing information and live music with their fans in a simple and inexpensive way. This type of social platform should also provide the fans the opportunity to
connect to artists without the trolling and distractions that can happen in other social apps.
Define
Empathy Map
Some sentiments from the interviews were pretty common. I created an empathy board to compile these ideas into clear and logical categories to give myself a better reference point of the Spotify user's wants and needs. From a business standpoint, to keep the artists engaged, the feature should allow the artist to control the content and interactions in a way to provide the user an engaging and special experience.
Persona
Using the most popular preferences and common pain-points from the user interviews, I was able to specifically give a persona to the user. These personas include fans of the artists who are both familiar and unfamiliar with Spotify, the artists themselves, and anyone who might be interested in checking out live feeds or music. Below are two of the different personas:
Define
Site Map
Taking all aspects of the research, I began thinking about how the information architecture would be most intuitive and effective. I created a sitemap for the current version of Spotify to get a feel for their layout and hierarchy. I focused on the areas where the new feature would most naturally fit into the existing structure. I displayed the new feature on the landing page and the Artist Page so both experienced and new users would be aware of it. Below is the most current version of the sitemap including the proposed social capabilities:
User Flows
Once the site map was decided, I needed the feature to be navigable in a simple and intuitive way. From the time a user first opens Spotify, they can discover recent or upcoming live streams with similar interactions and signifiers as the original app. My main objectives in this step was to inform the user of the new capabilities and allow them to easily find livestreams in a familiar and effortless way.
Usability Testing
Putting all the wireframes into working prototypes using Adobe XD, I lined up 7 participants to test the newly designed feature. Much of the feedback involved icon placement and consistency in command wording. In this testing phase, I also tested the feature with 4 "new to Spotify" participants to ensure it is intuitive and understandable.
Hi-fidelity Wireframes
With branding already in place, I integrated the new designs and pages into the current application. Most users have used the service enough that they interact with the functions without thinking and can easily spot changes if not done in a very consistent and similar way. Take a look below to see some of the final new capabilities and design choices.
Reflection
Although this project was an unsolicited redesign and feature add, I was able to give a fresh perspective on a feature that has been tried before and did not work. While many of the changes were not a huge deviation from other popular social apps, this project allowed me to make changes in functionality while staying within style and branding guidelines and improve user experience in a very popular app.
