Spotify

Challenge/Opportunity

The purpose of this project was to take an existing application and integrate a new feature into it. This allowed my team to practice the skills of research, design studio, and feature prioritization, among others. My group was given Spotify, and the following prompt:

“As the world’s leading social sound platform where people can find the right music for every moment, Spotify wants to expand the way users interactively share music. Spotify provides a platform for folks to create radio stations or browse through the music collections of artists, friends, and celebrities. Spotify users are able to “like” artists’ tracks, follow artists, create radio stations and playlists. Although users are able to curate their own playlists from songs they select, Spotify would like to create a feature that allows users to collaborate, DJing their select tracks with other users in real time”.

Research

We realized our first challenge, as a group, was to ascertain how people interact with Spotify, and what the term “DJ” meant to them. 

Through our user interviews, we found that people found music primarily through one of two ways: Spotify’s Recommendation algorithms and by sharing directly with friends, usually in person or through links. When we asked users what DJing meant to them, we found they responded one of two ways:

A. The process of playing one song after another at a social gathering.

B. The person who selects and controls the songs being played; usually a professional.

We also found three other key insights regarding the listening habits of our users:

1. Users are generally private with music, but it’s still important for them to share & collaborate with friends

2. People value finding new music, but need it to be easy and accessible

3. Music is a common element in social gatherings and there is a general interest in participating/influencing the ambiance

Persona

We created a persona named Jon who reflected the needs and interests of these users:

Feature prioritization

Based on these findings, we created a problem statement to help guide our feature prioritization before we moved into the prototyping phase:

“Jon avoids contributing to the music being played at a party because he feels he cannot do so unobtrusively. How can we enable him to seamlessly integrate his music into the environment?”

We decided on these three features as a must:

1. The ability to create a shared stream in the same way Spotify facilitates playlist creation.

2. The ability for the user to toggle the privacy settings, which can allow users to suggest songs or add songs without the permission buffer.

3. The ability to invite users to the playlist, and to limit the visibility of that playlist to those users.

These features align with both the needs of our persona and the business goals stated in the prompt.

Usability Testing

The solution: We created an option to create through the main library page, in addition to leaving the feature nested in the profile, through songs and albums, and every other way Spotify facilitates normal playlist creation.

User Flow

Final Thoughts

We found in our final round of usability testing, after we solved these issues, users were excited about the concept and stated they would use it. We even checked Spotify a few days later, and found they had added a “sharing” feature to their pre-existing playlists feature!

Click here to see our final prototype.