Spotify Product Feature: Quick Share and Direct Messaging
A common problem Spotify listeners face is the complexity of sharing music with people around them. I personally experience this problem occasionally, and sometimes, the music I share usually gets lost in conversation or ends up being ignored. This case study aims to solve this dilemma.
Note: this is a school project for MacEwan University’s Digital Experience Design Program.
Timeline: March 2021 - April 2021
Roles: UX Research, UI Design, Wireframing & Prototyping, Video Editing
Tools: Figma, Adobe Xd, Adobe Premiere Pro
THE PROBLEM
Make it simple to share songs with friends and family.
Spotify listeners know that sharing songs (or artists, playlists) between your peers is tedious. To share one song, they would need to use a separate app.
High-level goals:
Provide an easier way to share music between users.
from the perspective of music sharers
from the perspective of receivers
Get more people engaged with personal connections through Spotify.
THE SOLUTION
Restructure sharing and add direct messaging.
RESEARCH
Empathizing with the users
Before starting to ideate solutions for the challenge, I conducted a user interview, secondary research through Spotify’s community forum, articles, and subreddits. I drew current user task flows to deeper understand where their problems are standing out.
To clarify the users' context and the problem that we want to focus on in this project, I followed the AEIOUt framework to organize thoughts, observations, and ideas into categories.
Findings
Spotify used to have a messaging feature built-in. The feature was removed in 2017 because of low user engagement compared to its effort to maintain the service. I learned that the feature is hidden deep in the user's notifications, which can only be accessed only if they go into their profile page. This can be the biggest reason why there was lower feature engagement from the users.
Listeners find it tiresome to send a link through an external app. User interviews showed that Spotify users don’t like to depend on a separate app to share music with friends.
People usually use Spotify while doing mundane tasks. Spotify adds flavor to everyone’s tasks like doing the dishes, walking outside, driving around, working on the computer, etc.
IDEATE
The Point Of View (POV)
Creating a Point of View helps me formulate an actionable problem statement that will guide my design process.
Creating HMWs
The top 3 HMWs that I wanted to focus on are the following:
Play POV against the challenge: How might we make Spotify the app to use to socialize with people online?
Go after adjectives: How might we make the sharing experience encouraging and fun instead of frustrating?
Create an analogy from need or context: How might we improve the messaging system on Spotify?
Sketches
I usually do a rough sketch of my ideas before creating wireframes, flows, and mockups. As you can see, they’re really rough.
Wireframes
From rough sketches, I created mid-fidelity wireframes that address the people’s problems with sharing music, podcasts, etc., through Spotify.
Features
The main features of the app prioritize quick and easy ways to respond and share items with friends.
UI Flow
Following the creation of the mid-fidelity wireframes, I mapped the screens together and designed a UI flow for each scenario that can happen when sharing items through the app.
The First Prototype
I created a paper prototype, did a user test of it with the people I know, and took notes about initial thoughts of the feature's flow.
Mockups & Prototypes
After getting a green light on my paper prototypes, I carefully recreated the Spotify app and added the feature I introduced. I made sure that the fonts, colors, and layout follow the visual elements of Spotify. This was my favorite part of the process.
Eventually, I started to develop the prototype of the feature I was aiming to create. For this project, I used Adobe Xd.
Usability Testing
With a working prototype, I conducted usability testing in different environments repeatedly to see if the feature solves the problem users face like mentioned before, the complexity of sharing music with friends.
Feedback and Redesign
I only got one big feedback on my mockups, and it was about the microcopy I created when receiving messages. Other feedback I got was mostly about typography.
The microcopy when receiving a message was boring and generic. I decided to change the microcopy when a user receives a message, giving it a little more personality.
Reflection
Music can be a way to bond and connect with people close to us. As stated in PsychCentral, it encourages people to share parts of themselves through sounds strung together. But what if there is a barrier to this connection?
In the end, we created a feature that bridged the gap between users that want to bond through music. Sharing music with Spotify through this new feature will be easier and will require less time to complete.
Another feedback that I got for my new feature is that it looked too Spotify. It was too cold. While that’s a good thing, I need to push myself to be more creative.
If I had the time
I would’ve focused more on Direct Messaging because it raised a few questions when I presented it to others. While I had the answers to the questions, I wish I included it to this case study.
Next Steps
User Testing
I would conduct another round of User Testing in order to see if there are any vulnerabilities in my design.
Deep Dive on Spotify’s Direct Messaging
Direct Messaging was briefly touched on in this project. It would be nice to create another case study on the Direct Messaging feature.