A redesign of Spotify's UX to optimize collaboration and allow for increased music sharing and preserving capabilities.
PROBLEM SPACE —
Usability
Despite being the market leader in music streaming, from using Spotify's product on a daily basis, I have noticed some user flows and UX that could be improved upon. I decided to gather research from other users of the app to uncover further usability issues, with the overall goal of improving the user experience.
PRODUCT OPPORTUNITY —
How might I improve Spotify's user experience through research insights & user testing?
USER TESTING ENGAGEMENT —
Market Research
In order to get a sense of how Spotify compares to its competitors, I asked 3 users to explore Spotify, Apple Music, and Youtube Music. I watched what they paid the most attention to and how long they spent on each application.
Based on these results, people were drawn to the extreme personalization in Apple Music's UX, and the social features in Youtube Music. Spotify, while having pretty high engagement, was somewhere in the middle of both of these and people generally had a harder time navigating through various features.
RESEARCH INSIGHTS —
Individual Interviews
After gaining some insights on, I decided to do more focused interviews with a larger group of people. I after organizing the information, I noticed that all of the pain points, to some degree, had to do with either the social or individual aspects of the application.
DEFINING THE USER —
Identifying Challenges
I created a personas to help me actualize the user and to get the overarching needs and desires into writing.
Identifying the key insights and challenges also helped me to align and directly connect all my prototyped solutions with real user needs.
SOLUTION —
High-Fidelity Prototypes
After creating low-fidelity prototypes, doing user tests, and iterating, I was finally able to focus on a select few critical user journeys within the app and improve the experience through an intuitive information architecture, updated in-app social capabilities, and a new personalization feature.
RESULTS —
Without taking anything away from the existing user experience, my aim was to improve the focused user journeys by:
Reducing the steps in current flows to allow users to complete a task more efficiently
Adding features that make sharing simpler and eliminates having to leave the app to do so
Recognizing what is currently loved by fans of the app and add onto it
By observing the reactions and emotional responses displayed by the same users testing out the redesign prototypes, it was clear to see that the frustrations had been alleviated, and the changes were well received.
© Riya Bobde 2023