Rethinking Music Organization on Spotify
By: Sapir Shans
Tags: Search, Spotify, Design Thinking, Music, User Experience Design

Product Thinking

4 Main Problems Solved by Spotify

When I listen to music, I want to listen to a specific type of music, so that I can cater to the needs of an event or cater to my feelings / what I am doing

Spotify solves this problem with playlists as well as sorting music in the discover page based on different genres, moods, activities, and regions of the world. This allows users to easily find foreign top hits as well as their local top hits, and music that fits their tastes and moods. Some improvements to this could be to expand the ways Spotify sorts their music to include other items such as language or tempo. Or to localize top hits even more to cities (similar to what Shazam does) because for large countries that contain many different cultures (like the US) or for countries with different populations in different regions (like Spain or Israel) those different populations could be listening to different genres of music or even to music in different languages. For example, people in certain areas in Southern America may be listening to more country music or areas that have a higher Latino population may be listening to more music in Spanish (although of course this is a subject that would have to be researched). Or to even create automatic non-user generated playlists based on the people at a certain event, or schools, or clubs. Expanding the sorting would mean more curated playlists, which, would mean more people would need to make them and update them. Localizing top hits would probably be more programming, and also be a very large range (since there are so many cities) and similarly, creating playlists based off of people, clubs, or schools would also either be more programming (to extrapolate who listens to what) or would require more user input.

When I listen to music, I want to share my music with others, so that I can bond with them / talk about it / share my passion

Spotify solves this problem by allowing users to create playlists. This is great because it allows users to share specific songs that they like with others, who can then follow the playlist for more updates. You can also share specific tracks and playlists with others externally through Spotify. Some improvements could be to lessen the user input by sharing songs that they listen to a lot in a playlist or something like that, but this would require more programming and maybe the user doesn’t want people to know who or what they are listening to. Another improvement could be some sort of form of communication between users who like the same type of music, or friends who want to share songs directly in Spotify, but this would additionally require more programming and would be in competition with existing communication apps such as Whatsapp and iMessage. Also, Spotify’s main goal is to listen to music, and something like this may detract from that.

When I discover new music, I want to find new artists as well as new releases, so that I can listen to more music that I like

Spotify does this well by having a new releases section, which allows users to see new album or single releases. In addition it curates playlists for the user to introduce them to new artists based on what they listen to, and has a discover section to find music based on other factors like genre. It also has a create radio feature which creates a radio based on a song, recommending songs similar to it. To improve upon this, Spotify could potentially expand their discover section as I mentioned above to include other topics.

Current Problems

Some issues that the app currently has is connecting people to local artists. Sometimes people want to discover music in order to go to live concerts. Another problem is that not all songs are in it, and a third problem that kind of connects to the first one is that their discover section is kind of weak — although it works, it could be a lot better. The whole point of the discover section is to make it easier for the user to rummage through the almost infinite number of existing songs there are in the world to enable them to find what they like. There are still many overwhelming things on the discover section, and in addition many playlists have either repetitive artists or songs.

Problem Space: Spotify Discover

Start: I can’t find new music

Why? — It’s hard to search for it Why? Discover is very messy Why? — There are too many things to search through, and sometimes I see the same thing over and over again (a lot of the artists/songs are repetitive) Why? — I can only look through what Spotify puts out there — I don’t get to choose the content in discover, and it doesn’t know me well enough to recommend things I would like Why? — I don’t have the power to change the discover section and, in addition, the only other ways to search for music are if you know the name of an artist or song and then go through a clickhole or by looking for playlists

People Problem

When I look for new music, I want to be able to search for the type of song I want to find, so I can save time looking.

But I can’t do that well because

There is a lot of music out there The current ways to search for music aren’t specific enough for my needs

Examples:

I want to listen to slow music in a language I am learning but I can’t because I don’t know what to search for except look through all the music in said language and manually sorting them

I want to search for a certain song type like a rap about the government or a song that was originally a poem or a song with more than one language in it or a certain beat (like songs in 3/4 or something very specific)

Research

To look into this problem, I both conducted in user research in person and online through a survey as well as market research.

Goal: I want to identify key places people discover music on Spotify

Sub-Goal: Where? Through what means?

Sub-Goal: How often?

Sub-Goal: What are points in which they get frustrated in their music search?

Sub-Goal: What are they looking for?

Interview Protocol

Name:

Length: approx. 10 min

Permission to Record:

What are your main goals in using Spotify? And how often do you use it? How often do you look for new music? How do you feel about looking for new music? Why? When searching for new music, what are you looking for? When searching for new music, what is most important to you? Why? Through what means do you look for or discover new music? Why? Could you show me/walk me through how you find new music on Spotify? Could you describe a time where you got frustrated looking for new music on Spotify? (or in general?) How do you feel about Spotify’s discover section? Why?

What I found in my research was that people had mixed feelings about discovering new music, but people tied more negative words to it than positive ones (although it was about 50/50). Additionally, the way most people find music is a natural one with less effort rather than a search-heavy one. Most people discover new music through the people around them (including friends) or through things they do in their daily life like listening to the radio while driving, or going to a party or event, or going to a store and listening to the background music. Another thing that stood out in my interviews was that people either looked for new music from artists they already like or looked for new songs that fit the playlist mood or a rhythm that they like. The last thing that I wanted to point out that I did not show above was that a big point of frustration for people was not finding exactly what they liked. A lot of times people would say recommendations from Spotify were close but not close enough to what they wanted, or that they already knew about it, or that they didn’t trust them.

Market Research

Some current apps that address the issue of discovering new music are Pandora, Shazam, and SoundCloud.

Pandora, similar to Spotify, recommends music to users based off of an algorithm that learns based off of likes and dislikes of a song to recommend new ones. Different to Spotify, users get recommendations only while listening to a radio. This takes away the burden of looking for music off the user, but Spotify does that too with their algorithm as well.

Shazam allows people to find the song they are listening to currently. Similar to Spotify, it also allows people to search for top charts and new songs, however those features are widely less known and used. It enhances how people find music naturally in the world, by enabling them to keep track of songs that they like.

SoundCloud allows people to search for music through playlists, similar to Spotify. Its more catered towards creators and people who are looking for smaller artists, since they have the appeal of anyone being able to post a song.

Redefining the People Problem

People want to find new music, but they have a hard time looking for new songs or artists through the immense amount of existing music.

Synthesis

Trends

Journey Map

Brainstorming

I brainstormed with my friends Rebecca, a third year nutrition major, and Ariel, a second year student undecided. They both have very different tastes in music and both use Spotify to listen to music.

After the HMW (How May We)’s some of the restrictions in choosing Opportunity Areas were lack of visual problems and more algorithm based problems (specifically in the recommendations section).

At the end of the brainstorming session, we chose these 3 solution spaces because we either thought they were very promising or interesting spaces. We thought the description and identifying what you like about a song spaces would be good to choose since we are dealing with a search problem. The social aspect was to potentially mimic how people ‘discover’ songs out in the real world.

Our three solution spaces after the brainstorming session

Evaluation

To evaluate all our ideas, I conducted a SWOT analysis as well as weighed their feasibility vs. impact.

SWOT Analysis Table

Feasibility vs. Impact Table

Finally, I decided that song tags would be the best way to go. It’s a great answer to the people problem because it finally allows users to search for songs NOT based on the artist or song name, but based on content. It allows users to be more specific in what they want by searching multiple tags at a time, as well as let people look for songs that might not necessarily be in a playlist, especially since the Spotify playlists are repetitive. It’s better than some of the other features because at least for the features we came up with that aided people with what to search, it would not restrict their search to Spotify, since Spotify doesn’t really have a search mechanism at the moment.

Building the Feature

I chose the feature, but now I need to flesh it out and think of what it will need and how it can be integrated into Spotify.

Content Requirements

Following a Tag: People might want song updates of a specific type of song

Using multiple tags: This would enable users to find something really specific

Everything should be able to be tagged — whether that be song, artist, or playlist — because right now users can only search from the name of the content.

Tag recommendations: Users might not know what tags to look up

Tags should be clickable, if you click on a tag you are lead to the ‘tag’ page

Tag page

Being able to play a tag’s song content

Information Hierarchy

Necessary Interactions

Medium Fidelity

I explored a couple options for where the tags would go and how a user can get to them.

Refining the Idea

The flows I chose to prototype were the entry listening entry point, as well as the placeholder text underneath the search bar in the middle search mechanism point. I wanted to test out a few key things: if the user would be able to understand that the tags in the listening page are links and how clear it was that there would be tags on that page, and which placeholder text and description was better at telling the user that they can search for multiple tags as well as searching for songs and artists. So I came up with the following two tasks for my tested users to do:

I want to look for Arab electro traditional music. I want to find songs similar to the one I am currently listening to.

In all three of my tests, none of the users searched for multiple tags — one searched for one or the other, and the other two searched for the query in one tag linking the words together found that the placeholder text helped people understand that tags required a hashtag symbol in front of the search query, but did not help them realize that they could search for multiple tags. It was not clear that there would be tags on the listening page before seeing it, but after seeing it, all of the users I tested figured out that you could click on the tags (probably because you could click on the artist already).

Iterations

The entry points remained the same because they felt natural to the users, however I added a description for what the user could search for to make the search mechanism more clear. To additionally make it clear that the user could search for more than one tag, in the listening entry point, I added the option to search for all of the tags relevant to the song.

I also added tag adding to the end points to make it easier for the user to add tags to their search and refine what they are looking for. In the case of a search from the listening entry, it would be other tags relevant to the song, but from the search bar it could potentially be machine learning based on either what other users who searched for this tag searched with it, or what tags the user tends to listen to.

The listening entry point was clear enough from the studies I conducted, so I didn’t feel the need to change it. In addition, I thought it was consistent with the current Spotify flow. The search entry point, I added a description because that was unclear from the research I conducted. In addition, to the last page I added a refine your search section to make it easier for users to refine and get to what they are searching for. I got rid of the two-page sorting, this way the user gets to the results they want faster and in addition, it is more natural to have the type selection on the top rather than on the bottom.

Reflecting on User Testing and Prototyping

My user testing went well. The most important thing I realized it wasn’t super clear that you can search for multiple tags, which was a big part of how my feature fit into people problem so I decided to go off of that in my further iterations.

More Iterations

Some problems that my current flow has are that it is not clear tags can be pressed, and additionally, someone pointed out I should play around with the search results because they don’t need to necessarily be in list view.

So I continued with explorations specifically tackling these two problems.

This exploration improves the song discovery experience, testing out if there are any methods better than list view.

This exploration tries to tackle the problem of multiple tags and enabling the user to refine their search. Some were by emphasizing that the tags are links, but the others are selectable (kind of like refining a shopping search).

This was the most important exploration I did, where I tried to come up with ways to show that tags are clickable and interactive.

Onto Visual Design

Setting Goals

The only thing that may be better solved by visual design is showing that tags are clickable or links, however I think since Spotify tends to use minimal colors (white, black, and green) using a new color wouldn’t be fit, and Spotify green for symbols usually means it’s toggle-able, and these are links. The links (album names and artists) are currently not a different color.

Simplifying Elements

The added elements were the underlined texts for tags, which are needed because tags need to be differentiated from other elements in the sense that they are clickable and interactive. Another is the sorting tab with songs, artists, playlists, and albums as that’s how the new search structure will sort search queries so there needed to have a way to show what tab the user is on (how it looks like active vs inactive).

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed this exploration as I was able to go in depth in almost every part of the process. If I had more time on my hands I would have gone more in depth, whether that being conducting more testing or more research, but I learned a lot about the process through this project and for that I’m thankful. It made me think hard about how people perceive and relate to music, which is a very interesting subject in and of itself and could be researched very very extensively.