This project was created in collaboration with the Personalization Unit (PNZ) at Spotify, the world’s leading audio streaming platform. The mission of the PNZ unit is to create a personalized user experience for listeners and artists and to build a customized and engaging platform that provides a unique value for subscribers.
My role as one of the two product designers on the team was to conduct user research, curate the ideation process, and develop and design user flows, wireframes, interaction models, high-fidelity prototypes, as well as client facing presentations – all of the above according to Spotify’s design guidelines.
We conducted a series of preliminary user interviews to identify the main pain points users experience with Spotify. These interviews helped us determine potential interventions that aligned with the PNZ’s vision of reimagining users’ audio experience, and reducing frictions with Spotify products.
In our first design sprint, we evaluated the research outcomes and developed four proposals, which included a filtering engine for Spotify’s Liked Songs playlist; a group feature that enabled users to share audio content with each other; a radio-like audio experience with locally curated content; as well as interactive questionnaires, allowing users to proactively share feedback on recommended audio content.
In collaboration with Spotify stakeholders, the team conducted an evaluation session to assess the suggested proposals. For this, we created an evaluation matrix to rate our concepts with regard to Spotify’s principle business objectives: The number of monthly active users, strategic importance, new user growth potential, as well as technical scalability and feasibility. Ultimately, we settled on the Groups Feature, which met objectives for both user experience and business growth.
We next conducted additional user interviews and focused on Spotify’s current social features. In particular, we were interested in how users were utilizing these features and what problems and limitations they encountered while using them.
One key finding was that users trust recommendations of their personal networks over those of Spotify. Users were also very interested in the audio content consumed by their social environment and desired new ways to explore it. Furthermore, the sharing and collaborative curation of playlists, which is already enabled by Spotify, is heavily used by users, but they expressed a desire to make those playlists easier to maintain.
Spotify Groups is a novel social environment that allows users to create groups and share audio content among them. Furthermore, Spotify Groups provides users with group-specific audio content curated by Spotify that is based on algorithmic analyses of the users’ individual taste profiles and collective personalization algorithms. In that way, Spotify Groups diversifies the individual listening experience of users and provides new avenues for the discovery of content, and also incorporates the social components to increase user’s trust in Spotify’s recommendations.
The Groups feature lives within the user library and consist of three main features: The Group Feed enables users to share audio contents with other group members and to engage in group conversations. The Group Charts are based on collective personalization algorithms and provide users with an overview on the group’s top songs, artists, albums, and playlists. Lastly, the Group Members list allows for more granular insights into individual taste profiles of all group members.
The last step consisted of transforming our wireframes into high-fidelity designs. Critical to this process were Spotify’s brand guidelines. In an elaborate process, we analyzed the platform’s current UI and systematically developed our new user interfaces to ensure a seamless visual integration into Spotify’s architecture.
