Understanding the problem space

To acquaint myself with the problems facing Spotify users, I first had to identify how music listeners share their music - as sharing music can take many forms, I sought to uncover the most prevalent methods of sharing and identify problems.

To start, I created a survey with the goal of gathering music sharing insights from a high level perspective. My questions included:

• What are people’s general attitudes and behaviors around sharing music?

• What makes people want to share music? What makes them avoid doing so?

• What are the most common ways people share music, and why do they use these methods?

• Who are the people that share music most frequently?

• What are problems that people encounter when sharing music?

Analyzing attitudes and behaviors around music sharing

With over 30 respondents, I had plenty of data to help narrow my focus.

• The majority of users shared music for two outcomes: to start conversations with a friend or group of friends and/or to communicate their musical taste

• Users tend to share individual songs the most frequently

• The respondents reported they utilize text messaging and social media posts most frequently to share their music

• Most users share via mobile devices due to their preferred method of sharing

Digging deeper into user behaviors

While I now had more context around how Spotify listeners feel about sharing their music, I still had a variety of avenues worth exploring. I decided to speak to some of the survey respondents one-on-one to delve deeper into their answers. I planned to gain more insights around the following areas:

Music sharing as self-expression

• Many respondents noted that they share their music to demonstrate their musical taste to others.

• Why do people feel the need to use music to identify themselves?

Playing music in a larger social setting

• Many respondents shy away from sharing music in a larger setting. For those who have no problem with sharing, why are they so confident? 

• What settings do they share music in, and who are they sharing with? What is the kind of music they share?

Process

• I’m curious around the ways in which people are sharing digitally. Through the themes above, I hope to glean more insight into why people select their preferred sharing methods.

Vulnerability and judgment

• When playing music in a social setting, respondents noted the feeling of fear of judgment for their music choices. I’m curious what triggers that response.

Conducting the interviews

I picked five respondents, each of whom offered a range of music sharing behaviors based on their survey responses. They ranged from listeners who only engage in direct messaging with close friends, listeners who primarily post songs to their public social media profiles, to one who dislikes sharing music on the whole.

Identifying key themes

With my research complete, I looked for commonalities in my users to further guide my strategy.

Communication with Close Friends

• Participants prefer more private conversations - either direct text messaging or messaging with small groups.

• Personal context around music is important. Participants like sharing music that is important to them, music that others may like, or music that evokes a shared experience or connection.

• The communication of music in itself is the most important aspect, not necessarily the actual song.

Technical Process

• Preview capabilities are important, as well as display of song information.

• Ease of accessing the song in Spotify is important as well and participants frequently forego taking the extra step to open in the Spotify app.

Social Media

• Social media is not particularly used to start a conversation - it is more of a way to show followers musical taste and thoughts on music rather than engaging directly.

• It is not always conducive to actually listening to the music, as it is not the easiest process to preview or click into the song itself.

• Some users don’t see the point of sharing via social media if it will not spark a conversation, while others do so for that reason.

Shared Music Content

• The participants mostly share individual songs they like, though occasionally will share new albums.

Defining the users

I set out to create a persona to help build empathy and serve as a guidepost for my decision-making. However, I realized that there are two distinct psychological approaches the users take to share music with different goals in mind. I created two personas to represent the distinctions.

While the personas are quite different and seek to achieve a different set of goals with their sharing habits, I wanted to find the commonalities between them so my design could encompass both approaches.

Defining the right approach

With my research complete, I drafted problem statements to spark ideation and proposed solutions.

1. How might we allow users to display their musical taste to others?

2. How might we reduce the amount of steps taken in the sharing process?

3. How might we make it easier for users to display their thoughts and commentary aroud the music they share?

Rapid iteration and storyboarding

I then put pencil to paper to begin drafting some rough storyboards for solving these problems. After several rounds of Crazy 8’s iteration, I decided to focus on sharing within the Spotify app rather than adding or refining a Spotify integration in another platform.

Building on the Spotify user profile

I decided that the best way for users to display music as part of their personal brand is to expand the capabilities of the in-app Spotify user profile. Currently, the profile page offers limited interaction by only displaying the user’s image, name, and public playlists. My proposal included the following additions to the profile:

• A Favorite Songs section where users could add songs and commentary in a highly visible way

• A Social Feed where users could post songs and commentary in a less formal, more on-the-fly manner

• Retaining the existing Public Playlist function

• A new profile icon in the footer to allow easier access to the profile page

I began to refine my storyboarding exercise as well as came up with a feature list and requirements the new profile could include.

Narrowing my focus

Following the wireframe work and some preliminary prototype testing, I decided to focus on my idea for the Favorite Song feature and table the Social Feed idea. While both the Favorite Song and Social Feed feature could solve these problems, the Favorite Song feature would be faster to design keeping the timing constraints in mind. Also, testing revealed confusion around the function of the feed and what content would be displayed there.

Applying the design system

With my plan finalized, I applied the Spotify design system to the wireframes and began another round of one-on-one user testing.

High fidelity testing

The users were successfully able to navigate through the user profile page and understand the function of the Favorite Song feature. They also were excited by the idea, and all mentioned they would utilize the feature if it was ever implemented.

Looking ahead

In order to amplify the Favorite Song feature, work would have to be done in addition to the feature to promote engagement with users’ own profiles and the profiles of their connections. Based on my own experience and conversations with Spotify users, the profiles are underutilized and offer a lot of potential for users to individualize and share their music experiences.

This could include refining and designing a Social Feed function, as well a more robust direct messaging system to better serve the direct messaging-focused persona, both of which are interesting design challenges I would like to revisit.