Case Study: Spotify Bridge
— bridging the gap between Spotify users.
Brief: Enhancing Spotify’s mobile platform to allow for increased interaction and easier content discovery between users.
Background
Spotify is currently one of the world’s leading music, podcast, and video streaming services. Spotify’s mission is to provide a platform for creative artists to live off their art and to give their fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by them.
Problem
Given the current processes people use to share music, shared tastes are easily overlooked or lost in the clutter of busy timelines.
In efforts to share music with each other, Spotify users oftentimes have to turn to alternative media outlets. These outlets range from texts to tweets to stories and so on. By having to access 3rd party apps to share music, users experience a friction that breaks Spotify’s in-app user flow.
The biggest issue with sharing our favorite audio in these ways is that most casual social media users are accessing their timelines for reasons other than music or podcast discovery. This typically results in minimal post engagement which, in turn, leads to minimal fulfillment in the audio sharing experience.
Design Challenge
How can Spotify enhance its mobile platform to allow for increased interaction and easier content discovery between its users?
Would expanding Spotify’s capabilities as a social media platform be benficial to its users? Why is there a need for such changes?
Below I highlight my process based on research, design, and iteration.
Design Process & Scope
Methods:
- Secondary Research
- User Interviews
- Ideation
- Low Fidelity Designs (Sketching, Wireframing)
- High Fidelity Designs (Prototyping, Animation)
- Validation
Secondary Research
Before jumping into the Spotify app, I wanted to gain an understanding of how and why people use music from a social aspect. My findings revealed that the desire to share musical experiences stem from two sources: fundamental human motivation and chemical psychology.
A special aspect of music is that it gives us a sense of identity. When we listen to music, we tend to extract personal meaning and apply it our own lives and circumstances. Adolescents often report that delving into different genres help them both explore and communicate who they are to others.
Continuing my research, I was able to confirm the idea that the desire to belong really is fundamental to the human experience. For this reason, people use music as a tool to bring themselves together. This explains the sense of community we feel when dancing and singing together. Sharing these moments help promote trust, empathy, and relief from stress.
When we discover commonalities in musical taste with others, we usually assume that we share mutual values, outlooks, and characteristics. This communication of identity helps give us a sense of belonging to social groups who share the same values.
Scientifically, this fulfillment is further illustrated. When we participate in song and dance with other people, our brains release a hormone called Oxytocin. Oxytocin serves the brain as the “trust” or “love” hormone. This is the hormone that rewards the brain in response to love and social bonding. Additionally, scientists link dancing to the release of endorphins (pleasure chemicals) to the brain. These phenomenon explain the warm, positive feelings we experience while enjoying music together.
Why is any of this important?
Given the very nature of ourselves and the nature of music, we can see a clear overlap in the fact that they’re best experienced together. The modern day regularity of listening to prerecorded music in isolation is a relatively recent development when considering the entire timeline of music. While this activity is modernly taken as the norm, the aforementioned factors serve as the subconscious motors that drive us to share music with each other using the different mediums we do.
These mediums, however, oftentimes do an unsatisfactory job in fulfilling the pleasures that we wish to achieve when sharing our musical tastes with each other.
At the time of writing, Spotify currently allows users to share songs, albums, artists, and playlists in 5 major ways: through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and text messages. These five methods share two common traits, they require 3rd party app access and are mostly social media outlets.
Additionally, staying within the app, users have a few ways to discover music from a peer to peer perspective. Such features include collaborative playlists. This feature allows users to create a playlist and invite other Spotify users to add to and edit its contents.
Another way Spotify users can interact within the app is by visiting each other’s user profiles. Depending on the privacy settings of a given user, other users can visit their profiles and browse their most recently listened to artists and playlists that are available for public access. When visiting different user profiles, users have the option to “follow” other users. Given the current capability of the mobile platform, this feature serves no purpose. There is no where within the current Spotify app to view the activity of your friends.
Note: On the Spotify desktop app, users have access to a “Friend Activity” panel where one can see the current or most recently listened to song from their friends. This feature is natively toggled off so users must go to their settings to enable it.
This is the extent of Spotify’s capability as a social platform. If music is meant to be experienced together, why are Spotify’s social features so underwhelming?
Insights from Research
In analyzing my research I’ve emerged with 2 major trend-based takeaways that Spotify could capitalize on.
Since…
- Humans quite literally live to share the experience of music with one another
- And the current Spotify mobile platform does very little to facilitate this action within itself
… Spotify has the opportunity to provide a platform for users to share and discover music in a new way that will best fulfill its users desires,
drawing increased user interaction, exposing users to new music, and creating a better experience for Spotify users.
User Interviews
Conducting relevant research gave me a good idea of which direction to go in interviewing real Spotify users.
Demographics
- Current Spotify users
- Gen Z’s (21–24), half a dozen
- Variety of music taste: Alternative, Hip-Hop, EDM
- Single and multiple music streaming subscription holders
Understanding the Users
Before I asked users about the ways they share music and their sentiments about doing so, I wanted to get a general understanding of why they use the Spotify app. This included questions about their favorite features and frustrations in using the app.
Note: Users were asked to keep the mobile platform in mind, as that is the target platform of this case study.
Favorite Features
I asked users their favorite features in using the Spotify app to get an idea of where they see value in the app.
I found two main trends:
1. Users love the way Spotify’s mobile platform looks and feels
In almost all my interviews, it became very obvious to me that Spotify hit the nail on the head when designing its user interface and experience. Users love the Spotify aesthetic. According to users, this includes the organization of content, the color schemes used, graphic and picture styles used across the platform, and ease in navigation.
2. Users utilize the few social capabilities that they can
It became an overlapping theme to hear that users were enjoying features such as collaborative playlists, listening parties, and Spotify blends. These features are all great tools to get some user to user interaction out of the current platform.
Frustrations
In asking users their frustrations within the app, I found that many of them also revolved around Spotify’s social capabilities. One user expressed her confusion on the purpose of following other users in the consideration that the mobile platform doesn’t allow users to see the “Friend Activity” panel that is only available on the desktop platform. She continued by noting that 90% of her Spotify usage is done through her phone, not her computer.
Sharing Music
After getting an idea of why users valued the current platform, I asked them to reflect on the ways they: share music, are shared with, and their sentiments about both.
Paralleling my earlier research, users revealed that they primarily shared through 3rd party social media and text messages. Specifically, Instagram was the most popular social media outlet used followed by Twitter. No users reported using Snapchat or Facebook to share music with others.
In asking users their motives in sharing to Instagram and Twitter, I noticed two trends. First, users wanted to express themselves. Sharing music to their Instagram stories let their followers know the music they’re enjoying or how they’re feeling at the moment. Users also expressed that they share music to their stories in an effort to introduce followers to new music.
Additionally, users reported using text messages to share music with individuals or groups of people. Their motives in doing so were to intimately introduce music to others who shared similar musical tastes.
These answers stood out to me as relevant information. I noticed that user motives nearly aligned exactly with my research. People yearn to be understood and people love to experience music together. With this idea being confirmed, I had to qualify how good of a job the current sharing methods were doing in accomplishing user goals.
When it came to sharing to social media, users expressed that they felt the music they shared was often overlooked. Users also expressed that they oftentimes will overlook others sharing their music to social media. The reasons behind this varied. Some stated that they felt as though many followers have different music tastes and simply skip over their posts out of disinterest. Others felt that their posts garnered little engagement due to the fact that many aren’t primarily using social media to discover new music as much as they are to keep up with what their peers are doing.
Sharing music through text messages, on the other hand, garnered a different response from users. Users stated that sharing music through text messages can be more fulfilling. Users felt that when they share music with or are shared with others directly, the sentiment becomes more personal. Rather than a song being put out there for a user’s X amount of followers to see, users felt as though they are more inclined to explore said recommendations when they knew the person on the other end shared some level of similarity to them whether it be music taste or other characteristics. Again, this tied back to theme of identity and desire to belong.
So…
Considering the facts that Spotify users enjoy utilizing the app’s social features, tend to share their music with others, but feel as if the current methods to do so aren’t good enough, it becomes clear that an all encompassing solution could solve user problems.
Ideation
Through my research and my conversations with Spotify users, I discovered three main angles to approach the problem from.
- Users enjoy the intimacy of both sending and receiving music directly (i.e. text messages, group chats).
- Users enjoy introducing and being introduced (i.e. Instagram stories, Twitter) to new music by the people they share musical tastes with.
- Music sharers aren’t receiving fulfilling reactions from the music they share as it is often overlooked or lost in the clutter of busy timelines.
To ideate the perfect solution to cover these bases, I used the “How Might We” (HMW) method to brainstorm different approaches. My goals in pondering solutions were to keep solutions familar and simple, keep Spotify’s existing aesthetic, and to keep users within the Spotify app. Below are my HMW’s, followed by descriptions of each solution.
To mimic the way that users share information between each other directly through other mediums, a logical solution would be to introduce a direct messaging (DM) platform native to the Spotify app. Through these DMs, users could share songs, artists, albums, and playlists directly to friends or small groups in an intimate manner while staying within the Spotify app.
Assuming that users opening and using the Spotify app are doing so to listen to music, messages containing music are more likely to be engaged with if received natively. This simple solution would lessen the chances of these shared tastes being overlooked or lost.
To reimagine the ways that users share music to larger groups of people, a logical solution could be the implementation of a feed-like space where users could share songs, artists, albums, and playlists. This act of sharing could be done in a repost fashion, allowing users to not only share the music of their choice but also allow for captioning to express sentiments.
Again, since users are typically using the Spotify app during the moments they share with music, having access to such a feed within the app would eliminate the overlooking caused by disinterest in music discovery.
Lastly, to allow users to engage with the music that others share with them, a feature to react and comment on said music could be implemented. Similarly to the ways people can react to posts and messages through Facebook and iMessage, users would have the ability to do more than just “like” posts. By implementing this feature, users can experience the fulfillment of knowing their posts have reached and sparked emotions in other users. Furthermore, this feeling can be amplified by allowing users to share their thoughts through leaving comments.
Hypothesis
Adding spaces for users to share music between each other, while staying inside the Spotify app, will help users discover music easier and receive more fulfilling responses to the music they share.
This will keep users inside the Spotify app and increase the active user count.
Spotify Bridge — bridging the gap between users
You can find the interactive Figma prototype here.
Low Fidelity Designs (Sketches, Wireframes)
Concept Sketches
One of the main focuses of Spotify Bridge was to make sure that it didn’t become an overarching aspect of the Spotify app. This was done in an effort to avoid unfamilarity or major change to existing users. As can be seen in competing music streaming services, such as SoundCloud, an “in-your-face” feed can be overwhelming and repel users from future usage.
Rather, the goal of implementing such a feed would be to provide users a tool for music sharing and discovery. With these points in mind, the logical solution for the placement of this feature was inside Spotify’s existing “What’s New” tab. Once where users could discover new music and podcasts provided by Spotify, users could now see what’s new in the activity of their friends.
Similarly to the feed, a space where users could view their own posts felt as though it should be seamlessly integrated while still being easy to find. As can be seen in the sketch, the solution for this was to locate user posts in the existing “My Library” tab of Spotify. Where users are able to sort their library by artists, albums, and playlists, users could now sort by “posts” to see their posting history.
Additionally on this page, a small mail icon was added next to the “Search” and “Add” buttons natively seen on screen. Clicking this icon would take users to their inbox where message history can be found. These messages can include text and media found within the Spotify app.
Wireframing and User Flow
Using existing Spotify components, I mocked up the Spotify Bridge feed which can be found in the “What’s New” (Bell icon, 1st screen) section of the current Spotify app. This feed allows users to like and play shared songs, albums, and playlists. Users can also like and comment on the posts that share these tracks.
Using the same components found in the feed, users can also view the posts that they’ve shared in the past. Additionally, from this screen, they can access their message inbox and personal messages between their individual friends and group chats.
These wireframes contain the framework for sharing entire albums or individual songs to their Spotify Bridge Feed. Users can also send albums and songs to individual friends and groups. Theoretically, users can share playlists in the same ways. Again, existing Spotify components were used to retain familiarity and provide a seamless integration.
High Fidelity Prototype and Animation
Once where users could see only the new music and podcasts suggested for them by Spotify, users can now see the music that their friends share for their followers. Shared tastes are all central to one space, as opposed to being scattered through busy, cluttered timelines allowing for easier content discovery and interaction.
Implementing this feed provides users with another tool to share and discover music through the Spotify app. In addition to seeing what Spotify curates and suggests for them they can now discover music from the people they know, love, and trust.
Here, like many other forms of social media, users can view their posting history. This is an effective way for users to gain a sense of their musical tasting timeline and allow them to reminisce on the different times and feelings that accompanied the music they shared.
Through these direct messages, users can browse the many conversations that they have with other Spotify users. The same card-style media sharing blocks from the Spotify Bridge feed are used to maintain consitency. Once where music could be lost in long text message threads, users can now access their Spotify DM’s to access their more intimate listening and sharing history with other users.
The act of creating a post felt as though it should be integrated into the standing Spotify experience, for this reason the “Create a Post” option was added straight into the options that Spotify provides. By clicking this option, users can share the music they love and caption it for their followers, sending it straight to their feed where they are more likely to get fulfilling reactions and interactions from their followers.
Similarly, the direct messaging experience is fully integrated into the Spotify experience. Where users would once go to share music to 3rd party social media outlets, users can now send to other users or groups within the Spotify app. This tremendously enhances the user flow by keeping users nested in the app.
Validation
After iterating through design ideas and developing an interactive prototype, it was time to circle back to the users I interviewed to test the hypothesis I’d set out at the beginning of my design.
Hypothesis
Adding spaces for users to share music between each other, while staying inside the Spotify app, will help users discover music easier and receive more fulfilling responses to the music they share.
This will keep users inside the Spotify app and increase the active user count.
Discovering
After talking to interviewees, there was a clear consensus that adding a feed would be favorable to the music discovery process. Aknowledging their current methods of discovering music (from a peer to peer perspective), interviewees agreed that doing so while staying within the Spotify app would be more effective.
“…realistically, I usually won’t leave Instagram to listen to music that people post on their stories. If I saw them post it directly through Spotify, I’d definitely be more inclined to give it a shot” -Mike R
“I’m just happy I wouldn’t have to navigate from profile to profile scrolling through playlists to find the music that my friends are listening to anymore” — Amber P
Sharing
Many of the interviewees affirmed that having a feed-like space for sharing music would lead to more user activity. Given the fact that music shared through 3rd party apps garnered minimal interaction, users believed that the Spotify Bridge feed would likely attract more activity by allowing users to like and comment directly on posts.
Additionally, users appreciated the ability to share music by using the integrated DMs. Many claimed that sharing music this way was more intuitive from a one to one perspective.
One area that users felt could be improved upon is the way that they can see the reactions that they’ve received from other users. In the future, the aspect of reacting and viewing reactions (aside from likes and comments) on posts can be iterated and improved upon.
Experiencing
One of the biggest secondary goals in this redesign was to make Spotify users want to use the app more than they already do. The goal was to keep users within the app and to influence their friends to do the same. Like any good social media application, the more users and activity, the better.
By giving users something “to do” inside the app while listening to music, users affirmed that they would be more likely to stay within the app while they listened to music.
“Like any other social media, I would definitely want to keep up with my timeline” -Gabby Y
I asked users if they would suggest friends to switch to Spotify if such features were implemented. Overwhelmingly, the answer was yes. Users noted that if they had more friends on the app, they would learn more about them while discovering more music. Additionally, having more friends on the app would increase the potential for their shared music to be seen and interacted with. Both of these aspects contribute to the overarching idea that social and musical experiences are best encountered together.
Gauging Success
Accomplishing the goals set out in my hypothesis was the true measure of the success of this project. This meant that a successful solution would enhance the processes of sharing and discovering music, keep users within the Spotify app, and increase the active user count.
Based on the feedback I received from users, I would say the solution was successful and the hypothesis stood true. While many areas of the solution still have room to grow and improve, I believe that the implementation of such a solution would further Spotify’s influence on its users and the music streaming industry at large.
You can find the interactive Figma prototype here.
