During a 2-week sprint, our team enhanced Spotify's existing share feature using IOS conventions and patterns. We researched, analyzed, and designed using an Agile approach creating DM , video chat, and listen live feature.
Figma
Miro
Illustrator
Photoshop
Kevin Urban
Jerry Qin
Richard Tran
As a UX/UI designer, I led the discovery, user research, product thinking, information architecture, visual design, wireframing, prototyping, and testing.
Our team was given two weeks to research, synthesize, and test this concept to present to potential stakeholders.
Spotify is a music streaming platform that was founded by a Swedish company in 2006. Spotify is ranked the first streaming music platform with over 100 million subscribers.
(shown is Spotify's current Home Page)
Users of Spotify need a unified feature where they can connect, and have a community base so that they can feel supported physically, emotionally, and mentally through the application during times of disconnect.
We believe that by creating a feature on Spotify that ensures users the ability to connect, listen to music in real-time, and look back at shared music history, users will be able to successfully receive & give reactions/feedback and create a sense of community.
Our team started our research process with three objectives:
- Uncover pain points within existing Spotify’s user experience
- Identify challenges users have with the sharing feature
- Learn and familiarize ourselves with user behaviors and how they connect with other users
Our first step was to look at other music streaming applications similar to Spotify to understand their features and what they offer to their users.
We first conducted surveys to learn how our users communicate, interact, and listen to their music and their preferred music application. As a team, we each conducted user interviews to gain insight on current Spotify users' pain points and challenges with the current application. We wanted to learn how users shared their listening experience with others and the obstacles they faced along the way.
After conducting user interviews, we mapped out our data into an Affinity Map to synthesize our findings and discover trends.
- Real-time listening- Communication
- Emotional connection
- Sharing history
Our users' were frustrated they had to leave the application to share a song with others, not able to see their song history, and not able to listening to a song in real-time with friends and family.
“Music is a tool to incite emotional states or focus" -Erika Smith
After synthesizing our data from our user interviews and surveys, we were able to then compile the data into two different personas. The personas represent the different users who would interact with the features differently and have different happy paths and goals.
Our team decided to focus on designing these three features based on users' needs, behaviors, and pain points found in the research phase.
- Messaging in app
- Real-time sharing
- DJ/hosting capabilities
A considerable pain point we found users kept expressing was the challenge of communicating music to other users in-app. Frankly, Spotify doesn’t offer an in-app communication tool for users. Our team knew we needed to focus on creating feature(s) that allowed for users to communicate and share their music with other users.
Continuing the focus on communication and sharing capabilities, we asked ourselves, “how might we allow users to share music without having to leave the application?” and “How might we give users the means for them to create and share connections through Spotify’s application?”. We wanted to create a community for Spotify users, similar to other social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. We enhanced the share button by adding a DM feature, Share Live feature, and a Video feature to the application.
As a team, we went through a few design studio sessions, brainstorming ideas and curating a focus on features and paths that would answer pain points and challenges for Spotify users.
With our sketches, as a team, we created wireframes that pulled features, elements, and layouts from each of our individual sketches into one.
In our research, we found that users were frustrated with having to leave the application to communicate and share with friends and family. Also, most users either didn’t know where the share icon was on Spotify or they simply didn’t know they had the capability of sharing. In our research, users expressed that they like to communicate via messaging or video calling. We knew these features were important to include in our prototype.
(Interact with the prototype below)
Through usability testing, we found our users had difficulty navigating and uncovering a few components in the application.
Quotes from our users while using the prototype.
"Would be nice to have their names with the photos. Bit of a guessing game."
"I don't know how to share music"
"Would really love if the sharing journey showed what they're playing now"
In our 2nd iteration, we took the feedback our users had expressed and made the necessary changes to make the navigation clearer for users. In our second round of usability testing, we found engagement and connection improved by 40%. The changes we made in our 2nd iteration included:
(Interact with the prototype below)
"Song share streak is still a weak link from going to Share History but it's better than a button"
"Users appreciated clear titles and names for elements"
"Sticking with design conventions keep users happy"
