Spotify

Music Streaming - Social Queue Concept

Timeframe

2021 - 4 Weeks (80 hours)

Role

Research, Ideating, Information Architecture, Designing, Prototyping

Summary:

Spotify is a music streaming service that allows users to listen to one of the largest libraries of music both on desktop and mobile. They are always creating new features to help keep their users engaged and gain new users.

Goal:

Design and create a new Spotify feature that enhances the social features of Spotify.

Research + Discovery

Interviews

Through interviews it was apparent that the majority of users are happy with their current streaming platform and the process involved in sharing music. All users interviewed use Spotify as their streaming platform and each uses the sharing through text feature to share music with their friends. One of the users chooses to also share music to their instagram story for their followers to see. Users share music in order to support their favorite artists, convey emotion, or if it's a song they like that they think others could enjoy with them. Most users want a seamless experience where they do not have to click through too many options to share a song, and vice versa if someone shares a song with them. A big piece of sharing music for most is to be able to get a response. When texting music there is no way to tell if they actually listened to the song or liked it, so the user relies on a text response on how it made them feel. For sharing on a platform like instagram, users can often double click to like a user story, or even leave a quick comment giving their thoughts.

Pain Points

Annoying when someone shares music from a different platform and they can’t play it

The free versions are very limited in actions and full of ads
Hard to find friends on the mobile version
Feeling obligated to respond when someone sends a song
Having to click on generic links that lead to an internet browser

Persona

From the user interviews I was able to create a persona that followed the needs and wants of the average Spotify user.

Empathy Map

From the persona I was then able to move onto an Empathy map to help get a better insight on the specifics and deeper thoughts that the user may go through when using Spotify.

Planning

Problem Statement

To create a problem statement I came up with 20 “How might we…” statements pulled from the information gathered during research. From this I was able to single one problem statement to work off of.

How might we make it easier for friends to find music that they would both like to listen to together?

Ideation

Next was the ideation process based off of the problem statement. For this I used the crazy eights method to create multiple concept and building off of them each time around.

Story Boarding

From the Ideation I chose one strong idea to create story boards off of using them same method of crazy eights. The idea chosen was a social queue that allows users to send and receive songs to and from friends using a specialized queue.

User Flow

From the story board I then created two user flows that helped show the process of both sending songs to users, as well as receiving and reacting to songs from others.

Designing

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

For the Lo-Fi wireframes I was able to build off of Spotify’s standard design to add the new concept feature and see how it could best fit with the current design. Again I built this out as two different wireframes for the two user flows I had created.

Send Songs

Receive Songs

Usability Testing

Overview

For usability testing I used the Maze app to be able to easily send users a link that would allow me to import my prototype and quickly send the link to users to track their process through the flow and show problem spots. For the task I told the users react to a song that their friend had sent them through the new social queue feature. The second task was to send their friend a task through the social queue feature.

Summary

From the usability testing I was able to determine that the overall flow for sending and receiving songs was good, and simple enough for users to understand with minimal problems. During the testing I found that users would prefer to be able to react with quick emoji’s or comments, along with the need for some placement and hierarchy adjustments.

Designing

High-Fidelity Wireframes

After some usability testing I adjusted the final product to have an easy flow that was intuitive with Spotify’s current design. For this project it was a quicker process without having to create a UI Kit but being able to focus more on the UX of the new concept.

Send Songs

Receive Songs

Social Queue: Song Received - More Options

Social Queue: Songs Received - Reaction Sent

Reflection

The overall feedback from the users was that this was a positive experience that could be useful if implemented. Having the feature of the social queue keeps users within the app and can also encourage new users if they feel left out from the social queue experience within Spotify. With time to go more in depth with this feature and research, I could imagine adding features to allow sending music to groups of users and more ways to react to the music being sent. As it stands right now there are not many social features within the Spotify app and something like the Social Queue concept would be a strong start to changing that.