Spotify Friends: A Case Study
By: Eliza Salamon
Tags: UX Design, Spotify, Case Study, UX, Music

A few weeks ago, a friend texted me. “I saw you were listening to Mitski on Spotify,” she wrote.“Is everything okay?” Contrary to what she thought, I wasn’t in the midst of sad boi hours but was instead in perfectly good spirits introducing another friend to one of my favorite Mitski albums.

You can tell a lot about someone from the music they listen to. This example, however, shows the limited nature of Spotify profiles and their ability to accurately keep your friends up to date on your listening habits. (The Friend Activity section my Mitski song was spotted in is limited to the desktop version of Spotify.)

The social aspects of Spotify are underutilized because

Finding profiles is confusing. The only items one can display are playlists and recently played artists, which aren’t indicative of a user’s true tastes.

Spotify’s Social Problem

This semester, my first of college, I longed to feel connected to my friends who were miles away and the Friend Activity on my Mac wasn’t going to cut it. With all of us buried in our own separate work and some in different time zones, I usually couldn’t imagine having an entire conversation devoted to music. Beyond my own experience, I wanted to find out what other people thought of the social side of Spotify.

In my user testing, I found complaints and observations fitting into the following four categories:

In the words of one user: “Spotify doesn’t alert you [on a friend’s activity], you just have to go stalk them.”

Another takeaway was with users’ observations of Friend Activity on the desktop version. The consensus was that it was well-liked and fun, but a list of last played songs was pretty useless in truly discovering the music your friends are into.

Users wanted to share the music they felt passionate about, not just the song they were playing at any given moment. The inability to control what others saw and thought of their music taste was frustrating.

Spotify Pals: the Brainstorming Phase

I knew what I had to tackle—how did I make Spotify’s social features as accessible and accurate as possible? I gathered a ragtag group of friends to brainstorm.

John, Harry, and I after hours of hard work

Some of our key questions:

1. How might we make profiles customizable?

2. How could we format a social feature and where would it be located?

3. How might we share the content most important to a user?

After contemplating a few options (among them an Instagram-like music feed and Spotify Stories), I landed on a Friends tab devoted to a custom profile and the music updates your friends actively choose to share.

My research had shown that users wanted the music they shared to indicate what they loved, which is only currently possible through a playlist. Playlists, however, can be long and tedious, and users didn’t usually send them to friends except for very specific purposes. In order to give a concise and streamlined overview of a user’s taste, I decided to allow them to interchange 3 all-time and 3 recent favorite songs, albums, or artists on their profile.

My low-fidelity sketch

I decided that it was necessary to create a separate Friends tab in the navigation bar. This would make the feature simple to find and separate from the rest of the app.

Information Hierarchy

Composing the Layout

Profiles Galore

I wanted users to be able to display both their all-time favorites and their recent favorites, so friends could get a true sense of their taste and find new music. This would be done simply by choosing the item to update and searching the Spotify database for the new item, then updating. These updates would then be displayed by most recent first on the main page of the Friends tab, under “Profile Updates.”