UI/UX Case Study of Spotify

9 min readJan 6, 2022

Background

As a streaming music service, Spotify is one of the leaders on the industry and it wants to stay that way. For this reason, they want to improve engagement and retention in the app. In order to do that, they want to expand on their social capabilities.

Objective

Spotify wants to make a move into helping that connection further. It already has some core capabilities, like following artists or friends, and a basic feed of activity. However, there’s much more that can be done, the goal for this initiative is to determine the best way moving forward in that direction, and to provide Spotify with a prototype of the feature that can be integrated seamlessly within the app.

Design Process

Empathise

In this stage our aim is to be able to fully empathise

with both sides, understanding the business as a whole,

and also getting to know Spotify’s user community.

In order to successfully achieve that goal, we did an analysis of competitors, application audit, and went through the process of UX Research.

Competitor Analysis

To begin, we conducted a rapid research session of secondary sources. we spent a few hours getting a sense of Spotify’s place within the landscape of streaming music providers and gathering enough information to help determine the focus and scope of our research. We analyzed each competitor’s app on a mobile device to conduct our competitive analysis and to identify their strengths and weaknesses. This allowed us to uncover opportunities and help Spotify differentiate themselves with the new social feature, as well as identifying where opportunities for Spotify to differentiate itself with a social feature might exist.

Application Audit // Heuristic Evaluation

After analyzing competing applications we wanted to familiarize ourselves with Spotify’s current application by performing a heuristic evaluation. Although extremely familiar with the mobile app, we thought it was important to conduct an app audit. This helped us gain a clear grasp of the app’s architecture, hierarchy and content, which we felt was important to establish before considering how a new feature might integrate within the design.

Conducting UX Research

After familiarising ourselves with the company, the next step is to conduct a User Experience Research to better know the needs and requirements of Spotify users. This will help in adding realistic contexts and insights to the design process, that will lead in giving users the best solutions.

Research Methods

Both quantitative and qualitative approach was used in conducting our UX Research. The quantitative method was used as a pilot study, in a form of an online survey. The purpose of this method was to gain measurable data that described user’s behaviour and pattern which can help us identify a certain phenomenon in the realms of Spotify users that can drive the context of the research to a more specified manner.

However, quantitative data alone can’t reveal deeper human insights. Therefore, a qualitative approach to the research was needed to get an in-depth understanding of why users do what they do. This was done in a form of one-on-one user interviews.

User Interviews

we created an interview guide to ensure our interviews would run smoothly and questions would cover and validate research goals we had set at the beginning of our design process. The interview was driven by open-ended questions to get personal insights into their exercised habits on music listening, sharing contents and interacting on social media, also how they gather information.

User Criteria for User Interview

Knowing that there are different roles (Artists/Non-Artists) inside Spotify’s app, we believe that it is best that we gather all their perspective to gain a better understanding. we also believe that getting information from regular users of Spotify will help us gain deeper information, this could be done by looking from the demographic perspective of Spotify. Not just being active in Spotify, we believe that gathering information from users that are also active on other social media is crucial, from there we can see how regular Spotify users behave socially on other platforms, and look at what they are comfortable with. Based on these assumptions, we managed to identify the user criteria into these points:

2 Spotify Musicians / 2 Spotify Podcaster / 4 Spotify User (Non-Artists)
22–34 Years Old
≥ 2 hours/day spent on Spotify
≥ 2 hours/day spent on Social Media

Research Synthesis

After interviewing Spotify users, we created a map that consists of recurring answers that described how they think, feel, say, and hear in order to uncover insights and identify the user needs. Observations and statements were organized on virtual sticky notes, then paired together with similar information, identifying themes and patterns.

Insights

There are patterns of following random Spotify users that they find having similar taste in music based on created playlists.
Collaborative Playlist feature is commonly found to be used as a collective song library for song references or just pure sharing.
Sharing songs or podcast is found to be a form of self-expression.
Users have the tendency to find like-minded users on Spotify to connect and share content with.
Interaction between Artists and Fans are mutually found insightful and very enjoyable, especially in a form of live question and answer session.

Needs

Users need an efficient way to find like-minded people.
Artists need a space to engage intimately with their fans.
Users need a space to share and receive information (e.g. songs, podcasts, etc).

Creating a Persona

In order to develop a typical Persona that depicts the average audience member, We looked back over the Insights, the Needs and the Pain Points from our Empathy Maps. These Personas also highlights the major needs of the most important user groups so that they can be addressed.

Define

Defining The Problem

With a persona established, We moved into translating the insights and needs into defined Point of View Statements, then crafted a set of How Might We Questions to guide our design. By defining the design challenge and framing it as a question, the roadwork for the ideation phase was paved for a range of innovative solutions.

Comparing and Understanding Business & User Goals

Before heading in to finding ideas for a solution, we need to make a comparison between both sides in order to consider both Spotify and User’s priorities. With that in mind, we mapped out business goals, user goals, and technical considerations. The overlapping areas of this diagram identified the project goals, where we focused all our time and effort.

Defining & Prioritizing Features

We looked back at ideas that came up during our brainstorming session, in consideration of the business and user goals we determined which ones could be further developed into a social feature that would respond to the needs of both parties.

The main idea of Spotify Forums is to provide a space for users to interact both casually and intimately in a form of question and answer posts where they can emit questions to whom they see fit to find answers from, also able to answer questions they receive from others. This will allow users to find like-minded people inside Spotify or connecting both artists and fans on a deeper level without any hassle, in hopes to provoke their social drive, increasing the application’s engagement and retention.

Assigning Structures

We then created a revised app map for Spotify, showing how the new feature would integrate within the existing architecture of the app.

Prototype

Charting Paths

With the new feature fitted into the application’s architecture, our next task was to design flows that would best fit the feature. We first created a task flow that identified a key task that all users complete in an identical way.

Then, going into even more detail, We created a user flow thinking through two scenarios, showing two possible ways a user might interact with this new feature. Doing this helped us make sure I’d included all necessary key frames I’d need as we created wireframes for our prototype.

Initial Wireframe and Prototype

After barging through a long process of sketching low-fidelity sketches, we managed to come up with the first high-fidelity wireframe that is ready to be used as a prototype in the first usability testing.

Testing

Usability Testing

The purpose of the test was to assess the usability of the feature, interface design, information flow, and information architecture. Four tests were held under two sessions, a total of 46 participants were involved in a usability test to ensure stable results.

On the process of actualizing the main goal, We conducted a usability test under two circumstances; moderated and unmoderated. Both will be held online due to the pandemic outbreak of Covid-19. Maze Usability Testing website’s service will be used for the unmoderated test, and for the moderated test, test administrator will host an online meeting session and will provide an array of task and questions for the participant to comprehend. The session captured each participant’s navigational choices, task completion rates, comments, overall satisfaction ratings, questions and feedback through a screen recording of the meeting. Each unmoderated test sessions took approximately two days to complete, both the moderated sessions lasted approximately one hour per individual.

In general, the first session stated that the feature served a clear purpose and was easy to understand. Participants were able to get the goal of the feature right away and found it very useful. There were a few key problems from the first sessions which we then captured into a map.

Conclusion

Before encountering this project we didn’t really know much about the wide and varied world of Design. We just thought that designing is just creating websites or applications mock-ups on Photoshop or Figma.
We ended up discovering that there’s a lot of research, scenarios creation and prototyping to create an easy to use application.
We worked on solving Alex’s problems by sketching some solutions to the existing Spotify desktop application UI and we’re very excited to convert those sketches into beautiful prototypes on Figma in the next steps.
We think that the biggest lesson behind this project is that to create powerful software, you don’t only need a good software engineering team but also a great Design team, because without good UX and a beautiful design none will use your software.