Sharing music with friends — Spotify UX Design Case Study
Music is my love language. The best connections and relationships I have made stem from sharing a love of music, making playlists for each other, and bonding over new music.
After listening to frustrations of my fellow music lover peers, I decided to ideate and design a potential Spotify feature that would further help people express themselves through music and connect with one another.
Initial Discovery & Research
Finding problems worth solving
From the annoyances found in tweets, Reddit threads and app store reviews, frustrations fell into two themes: socialization and sharing.
Socialization: The only way to interact with other users is by following one another; however, there are no notifications to see who follows you and when. Spotify’s main social feature is Friend Activity, but it’s only available on the desktop application.
Sharing: Current options to share are either via messages or posting on social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, & Snapchat). No way to maintain what has been shared with you without manually adding to your library.
Problem: Spotify users need an easy way to share songs + engage with other users
But how do other streaming services promote sharing and community?
After diving into other top music providers to analyze potential market gaps that Spotify could capitalize on, it was clear that no streaming service promoted user to user interaction within the app outside of following.
Understanding Users
Whose problem am I trying to solve?
As of February 2021, Spotify has 345 million active users, of which 155 million are paying subscribers (45%). Additionally, Spotify estimates that they will have 172–184 million Premium subscribers by the end of 2021 (an 8.29% increase).
With users being available on multiple platforms and devices, the most popular is mobile devices with 52% of users showing love for their smartphones. Meanwhile, 10% of users access Spotify from their tablets.
What are users currently doing to share with their friends (and what are pain points associated with it)?
After mapping out the journey of sharing songs in Miro, I noticed there were two main actions involved — Sharing and Receiving content.
This step helped me visualize how users interact both within and outside of Spotify, call out different pain points in the process, and start brainstorming solutions.
From journey mapping, I identified the main pain points being that sharing songs forced users to interact outside of Spotify in some capacity, suggestions were either lost right away or required user to manually save, and lastly there was no community element to sharing.
Prioritizing Design Decisions
Which ideas will best serve user needs?
Keeping in mind my user demographics, competitive analysis with other streaming services, and current pain points for users, I picked 5 main design decisions to guide my solution.
Wireframing
How can I make my solution intuitive and effective?
Wireframe #1: Sending recommendations: For the first user action of being the sharer, I incorporate sending recommendations into the current sharing flow. I also promoted and visualized the feature by making it the first sharing option.
Wireframe #2: Receiving recommendations: Since Spotify has little to no notifications when it comes to interactions with other users, I knew this would be crucial to design effectively to ensure engagement.
I decided that Option 1: Big Notification would be too disruptive, especially for the use case of repeated recommendations. Option #3’s Icon Notification would force users to leave current page and navigate to their Library, and lead to excessive clicking.
Option #2 allows users to easily navigate to recommendations, dismiss the alert without excessive clicking, and still access other features on the home page.
Perfecting the Little Things
How do we make the most out of 365x80 pixels?
While thinking through the actual design of the notification, I went through several iterations to ensure that it benefited users. With the notification itself being small, I wanted to make sure that it contained all relative information without being crammed. Additionally, I ensured that the styling matched the rest of the homepage so it was not distracting.
High Fidelity Prototype
Solution: a sharing feature that allows users to directly send songs within app, automatically populate a playlist with songs received, and help engage the Spotify community.
In order to test my hypothesis, I put together a high-fidelity prototyped with key design features.
“Shared with you” playlist to keep track of recommendations (1/4)
Clearly visible notification upon opening the app that navigates users to playlist filled with recommendations from friends.
Easily dismiss notification (2/4)
If a user has other goals while logging onto the app, they can quickly dismiss the shared notification without being disrupted.
Quickly share to suggested friends (3/4)
After gaining initial feedback with my prototype, one of my users mentioned that they “really only followed a few people so there was no need to search everytime.” Upon hearing this, I improved my design to have pre-suggested users in addition to being able to search. Incorporating profile pictures also helps visualize the community more.
Sort by friends (4/4)
By allowing users to sort the “Shared With You” playlist by friend, this would help showcase interactions more and visualize who you received most of your recommendations from.
Integrating with Spotify ecosystem
But wait — it doesn’t stop there
Looking into the future of an in-app recommendation feature, I considered how this could fit into the overall ecosytem. By encouraging engagement between users, this opens up more opportunities and cumulative stats for “Wrapped.”
If I had additional time & resources, I would…
- Seek user feedback that wasn’t friend or family. Since this was a side project done over a holiday break, my user research participant type was limited. With more time, I would like to talk to people that I wasn’t close with to try to eliminate any bias and get honest feedback.
- Plan onboarding + ways to make feature visible. As of now, the feature is only evident via notification (if a user has content sent to them) or via discovering it while trying to share a different way. I would love to expand on potential ways to show users that the feature is available.
- Think through privacy logic of sending recommendations. What if I am a Spotify user who doesn’t want any recommendations? Towards the end of this project, I realized that there could be potential issues surrounding who could send who what. Whether it was only being allowed to send if the follow was mutual, limiting number of shares a day, or something else, I would like to flesh out this logic more.
