Spotify, one of the best streaming music apps, has new updates!
By: Federica Matos
Tags: Spotify, Features, UI Design, Improvement, UX Design

There is always room for improvement!

We have already advanced a lot in the program, the designer mindset is becoming a part of me more and more while the projects have increased in demand. This project consists of analyzing an existing and frequently used application to add a new/missing feature. We were free to choose between a large list of applications and I chose Spotify.

Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video streaming service that gives a user access to millions of songs and other content from artists all over the world.

The main focus of this project was on visual design skills since our job is to create a high fidelity prototype for the first time.

To understand the streaming music industry and the impact on user behavior within the market, I carried out secondary research. These are some of the insightful facts that I discovered:

44% of users listen to Spotify on a daily basis.

There are 40 million tracks available on Spotify.

The following chart shows the feature comparison between Spotify and other popular streaming music companies. Something that is very interesting, is that although Spotify does not have any of the listed features, it is the most used in the market. This is the reason why this type of study serves to highlight strengths and weaknesses within the industry and therefore opportunities to improve.

Competitive Feature Analysis

This comparison allowed me to see that Spotify is the most inclusive of the streaming companies, while Apple Music is positioned as the most exclusive, since it can only be used with devices from the same company.

On the other hand, most young users prefer Spotify, while most older people use Pandora.

As user experience designers, we are always keen to understand what the user’s objective is, how they feel and their overall experience when they use a product. We want to find out what could facilitate the scenario in a specific activity or what could give them greater satisfaction. For this, 6 interviews were conducted. To help collect the data I used the application Otter, which I highly recommend. It makes the interview flow more easily since it takes notes as one speaks.

Otter lets you record, transcribe, search and share your voice conversations. … Essentially, a voice recorder that offers automatic transcription, Otter is designed to be able to understand and capture long-form conversations that take place between multiple people.

Quotes from the interviews

Most relevant Pains (opportunities to design):

I wish Spotify had a history list.

The “Jump back in” (actual feature to listen to previously heard songs) is not accurate.

It would be nice if Spotify had voice control.

Pains and Gains gathered from interviews

All the collected data was organized an affinity map and value proposition canvas. Once classified by gains and pains we could define gain creators (how the product or service creates customer gains and how it offers added value to the customer) and pain relievers (a description of exactly how the product or service alleviates customer pains).

For further information, bellow is the link of a website that explains it with details.

What is the Value Proposition Canvas? The Value Proposition Canvas is a tool which can help ensure that a product or service is positioned around what the customer values and needs. The Value Proposition Canvas was initially developed by Dr Alexander Osterwalder as a framework to ensure that there is a fit between the product and market. It is a detailed look at the relationship between two parts of the Osterwalder’s broader Business Model Canvas; customer segments and value propositions.

Jobs to be done framework was a new tool that I used for the first time in this product. This very effective tool can transform our understanding of consumer choice in a way that no amount of data ever could. Through this practical technique, one creates a sentence that describes a story and looks at situations and motivations for an outcome.

The JTBD template is as follows: The when focuses on the situation, the want focus on the motivation, and the can focuses on the outcome.

Basically, this tool helps one to describe a user’s ideal scenario when using the product.

New Feature Story:

When I want to listen to a song that I’ve heard before, I want to have an organized history list, so that I can find it easily and quickly.

Based on the data, I implemented a song history feature to implement the feature of a Songs history, (just like the one Googles creates when you visit a website), so that users can have access to a playlist with all the songs they have listened to in the past.

The MOSCOW Method helped me to narrow down the many features that I brainstormed and assisted in creating the MVP.

Prototyping

The moment to design arrived and I was ready to implement the solution to the most relevant users insights gathered from the interviews. So, after analyzing the existing visual design, and based on the data gathered, I added the “Song’s History” as one the options Spotify offers on the Home Screen.

It was extremely important to design within both Spotify’s and Apple’s existing guidelines.

The added feature created a classified “Songs history classified “Songs history” based on time (Today, Yesterday, This week, Last Month, etc).The feature also gives access to the songs history give access to the Songs history from the “Your Library” section located in the Navigation.

Also added to the feature is the option of sorting the playlist by “Most played order or played order”. The other options shown were already part of the app.