A Shared Spotify: Creating user groups
Spotify is the dominant music streaming service in the market. A user can look up virtually any song they want to listen to instantaneously. But with such a large arsenal of songs on the application, how easy is it for users to discover new and relevant?
Throughout my research, I focused on three points:
- I want to know which features user’s use to find new types on music on Spotify.
- I want to discover how user’s share music through the Spotify UI.
- I want to understand the motivations of users when they listen to music.
How Spotify Currently Discovers Music
Spotify has many discovery-related features. These include Discover Weekly, mixtapes, Time Capsule, Daily Mixes, etc.
There are certainly many methods of discovery on Spotify. But how are users able to find relevant music?
Understanding Users
My initial hypothesis was Spotify has inefficient music discovery and poor social engagement. I interviewed five participants and distributed an online survey to test this hypothesis.
Users felt frustrated by Spotify’s music suggestions or stuck in their own music.
Most users found fault in Spotify’s suggestion services and pre-made playlists.
“They end up suggesting music that I don’t actually like.”
“I wish there were a way to organize song by their ‘sound,’ not just the genre”
Most users went to their friends playlists for music when discovering new songs.
50% of people that sharing common music with others was important. While most users shared music at least once a week, they did so outside of Spotify.
I created a persona, Karen, to represent my users.
Karen is a junior in college who is a premium subscriber to Spotify. She is president of a dance troupe and loves to choreograph pieces. When she choreographs new dances, she likes to dedicate a lot of time to finding the perfect piece of music. She finds it difficult to find pieces that are different from what she listens to. She often enlists her friends to find songs, especially via playlists.
To The Drawing Board
I recruited my friends and Spotify users Aubrey, Yueer and Angela to brainstorm.
After exploring, we narrowed down our concerns into three themes:
1. Sharing: How might we make music a more shared experience?
2. Diversity: How might we suggest diverse, still relevant music?
3. Discovery: How might we make music discovery easier, intentional and relevant?
I conducted a guerrilla testing session to narrow down potential features. The majority of users responded positively to the groups feature. Key considerations included:
- Other people know songs that you don’t, so sharing would diversify tastes
- But you might have different opinions of good music
Justifying a “Groups” Feature
The main purpose of the group’s feature is to connect people through Spotify with similar interests and motivations when searching for music. This focuses mainly on shared discovery, but invites a social aspect to Spotify as well.
Instead of focusing on genres, groups focus on user aspirations and interests.
Initial Designs
First Use Case: The flow represents users who are joining already existing groups. I used Karen, my persona, to customize the flow (Remember, Karen is a choreographer constantly looking for new songs).
There are a lot of ways of discovering groups: Spotify Featured groups, Active Groups, New Groups. The user can see groups that their friends have joined. Knowing that your friends belong to a particular group enables trust to join the group. Tags help categorize types of content that a group can be broken down into. The user has the ability to favorite a channel to help prioritize things that are more relevant.
Second Use Case: The second flow represents a smaller scale groups. Users might want to create small groups within their community with their immediate friends.
Users can enter “Your library,” a more personal entry point than the Home page in the first flow. They can edit and create a new Group. When creating a new group, the main emphasis should be to a) invite friends to join it and b) add content.
But does joining a group alone fully address the idea of music relevancy?
Exploring Channels:
I went into further exploration with channels and tags. While it was useful to have both, I felt like they were missing important steps that would help with the relevancy issue.
I decided to have three tiers of information.
- Channels — This is an overall category that helps the user narrow down what they want from the group. Each channel previews tags within it. Ex; Tempo is a channel and previews two of its tags: 100bpm (beats per minute) and Slow & Easy.
- Tags — These are subcategories of a specified channel. Examples: 100bpm, 80 bpm.
- Content — This is the actual music within a tag. I used categories like Songs, Playlists, Videos, Podcasts. These are all current ways Spotify organizes its libraries. Within each content category, a group member can “add” music.
Creating the prototype:
I adapted the medium fidelities into high fidelities and used Principle to create interactions between my screens. I conducted usability sessions, looking to answer the questions of?
Do users clearly understand the structure of groups, and would it efficiently help people narrow the scope of music discovery?
A common issue I found was with tags. Users were confused by the purpose of a tag. Are they a kind of label? Can you tag specific content? Are they clickable?
Final User Flows:
Let’s Organize:
The first user flow allows users to create groups. When talking to users, many of them expressed how this would be useful in organizations or how this might encourage bonding amongst friends.
So I’m Looking for a Song…
The second user flow aims to make discovery easier, purposeful, and diverse, but specific. Contradictory, I know. It allows users to choose their area of interest, but also gain exposure to music they would not discovered previously with little searching.
I was concerned that the flow might be too long to find a new song, but users did not seem to mind. A design consideration I might make in the future would be to visually differentiate between the pages so users don’t get confused where they are within the group.
Design Suggestions
In the future, I think it would be valuable to focus more on the social aspect of the Groups feature. While Groups are useful for discovery, is there a way that the members within them have meaningful interactions with each other?
A potential solution might be “reacting” to songs. I earlier explored the idea of users threads, but found through user testing that subscribers would probably join threads out-of-app. Same with sharing. By adding reactions, whether in the form of comments, emojis, or likes/dislikes, this could potentially engage users in
I also noticed during the usability session that users were interested in the Friend Feed. Perhaps this feature could be blown up on a larger scale. Can you connect users who are listening to a certain song at the same time in some way? Instant chat, suggest friendships, recommend other shared songs?