Spotify
Spotify has led the way with personalization and created a cultural shift with their Spotify Wrapped, Discover playlists/suggested songs, and other specially curated playlists. Yet, sometimes users still find themselves hitting skip, especially when exercising.
By creating a way to tailor playlists based on a user’s workout, they can be hands-off and focus on their activity causing the friction to find what they're looking for to decrease and in turn, increase their satisfaction.
Goal: Add a feature to an existing music app
Role:
UX Researcher
UX/UI Designer
Project Duration: 75 hours
Tools: Figma (for design), Google Docs and Google Sheets (for research and interviews)
Constraints:
Creating deliverables within set timeline
Competitive industry
Uphold brand identity and follow established patterns
Background
Spotify already has immense personalization capabilities making playlists based on a user’s taste, mood, or activity. Usually, their algorithm hits home for taste and mood – but when it comes to activity, specifically working out, they sometimes miss the mark. It’s quite disruptive during a workout to keep skipping through songs until a user finds the right one, which indicates that the user’s needs are not being met with Spotify’s current features.
Discover
Research
Research Goal
The goal is to learn how people use Spotify while working out so that we can create a feature that creates more specialized playlists based off of activity(s), meeting their needs/desires and improving their overall experience.
Research Methods
Secondary Research: Competitive SWOT Analysis
See what our competitors offer and at what price points
Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, core competencies, demographic, and product features
Competitive SWOT Analysis
Key Takeaways
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A lot of overlap between competitors and their product features
Training plans/workouts
Goal setting
Compatibility with wearable devices and other app integrations
Activity tracking
Performance data tracking and analysis
Community groups and challenges
Social network
Most apps are only focused on running or a limited range of activities
To get all the benefits of the app, users have to give up a lot of personal data
Subscription may polarize and price people out
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Striking the balance between how much personal data people are willing to provide and how much the platform needs in order to create the desired levels of personalization for users
Including other sports and activities
Meeting users where they are (experience, goals, etc.)
Offer subscription plans in correlation with users’ perceived benefits gained and price point
Primary Research: User Interviews
Conducted remote interviews with people who use Spotify and people who use Spotify while working out
Heard users’ first-hand stories of how they use Spotify while exercising and what role it plays in their workout to better understand their preferences, feelings, experiences, and challenges
Synthesized interviews through affinity mapping noting any patterns and reoccurring sentiments, and deriving insights to inform problem definition and problem solving.
Affinity Map
Utilized an empathy map to further understand what users are thinking, feeling, saying, doing, hearing, and seeing when using Spotify during a workout
Empathy Map
Key Takeaways
With the learnings from user interviews, it is confirmed that the suspected problem for users is valid and a personalized, workout-focused playlist curation feature is desired by users. Because of this notion, I moved forward with developing this feature.
Average likelihood to use feature: 9.8
*Rated on scale of 1 to 10
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People use music…
As background noise during a workout
Enjoy the time they’ve set aside for themselves
Use workout to disconnect + decompress from their busy lives
As a metronome for exercises
Getting their workout done efficiently and effectively
Want to see the results of their hard work come to fruition
As a source of energy and motivation
Challenging themselves to be consistent with exercise
Completing workout
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Time + effort to curate music on their own
Lack of ability to input specifications so they can receive a more personalized output
Music incongruent with their movements
Lack of novelty
Grows tired of the same old music over and over again
Energy is fleeting
Could lose momentum towards workout
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Time/free time
Content specific to their tastes, activities, moods, etc.
Freedom to choose their own music
Freedom to rely on platform
The lifting of responsibility / sense of control from themselves
Ability to zone out
Guidance from rhythm to attune themselves to
Feeling empowered
Define
Research
Who is the User?
Three distinct personas developed from research synthesis.
Taking all learnings from user interviews and boiling that down into a characterization of who the user is. This helps ground me in a narrative to fully understand and empathize with the user and provide a framework for what potential solution can remedy them.
Personas
What is the Problem?
Finding the music that allows users to zone out and drown out the noise of their busy lives during their workout
Finding the music that fits users’ exercises seamlessly
Finding the music that gets and keeps users motivated throughout their workout
“How Might We” Solve the Problem?
Coming up with and posing “How might we?” questions based off of insights, needs, and POV statements to ideate potential solutions for users.
How might we help Spotify users who use music as background noise find music so they don’t have to look down at their phones and can enjoy their downtime without disruptions?
How might we help Spotify users who use music to set the cadence of their movements find music that fits their exercises seamlessly so they don’t waste time looking for music?
How might we help Spotify users who use music as a source of motivation find music that gives them an extra push of energy, sustain it throughout their workout, and want to keep training?
“How Might We” Statements
What is the Solution?
“Fit for You” is a new feature that allows users to further customize their playlists specifically to their activities, music preferences, etc. allowing them to worry less about picking music and to focus more on their workout.
Once the previous was determined, it was time to lay out the groundwork for this new feature: how it will fit within the already existing app architecture and how users will navigate their way through it.
Project Goals Where the business and users can be satisfied and what is technologically attainable
Feature Road Map Prioritizing what is needed to make this new feature
User Flows Defining key tasks users will perform in order to reach their goal and what that corresponds to in the app’s architecture
Key Tasks
Onboarding
Changing user preferences
Develop
Design
LoFi Wireframes
With a strong foundation established, it was time to start building the feature starting with creating key screens based off of the main user flows (onboarding and changing user preferences).
Flow 1: Onboarding
Flow 2: Changing User Preferences
Test
Design
Usability Testing | LoFi Wireframes
To make sure designs were on the right track, remote usability testing was conducted on the low-fidelity wireframes in order to:
Evaluate ease of use, efficiency, and overall experience
Identify pain points and challenges users face when navigating screens/through task flows
Learn what changes can be made to improve user experience
Results & Feedback
Average ease of Task 1: 9.4
Average ease of Task 2: 7.0
Average overall satisfaction: 9.6
*Rated on scale of 1 to 10
All users were able to complete each task with minimal to no errors. Overall, tasks were deemed easy and users were satisfied. The second task was drastically harder for users as it was difficult to find where Settings was in the app. With that being said, there was room for improvement with these revisions:
Add copy to BPM section of onboarding to indicate it's optional
Add instructions where to edit after completing the initial onboarding
Change Workout in navigation to Fit for You so it's congruent with the feature name
Develop
Design
HiFi Wireframes & Revisions
With the feedback from early usability testing, it was time to take the wireframes to a higher fidelity and implement changes.
Flow 1: Onboarding
Add copy to BPM section of onboarding to indicate it's optional: Users now can see a disclaimer that this field is not required to fill out in order to complete the flow.
Flow 2: Changing User Preferences
Change Workout in navigation to Fit for You so it's congruent with the feature name: By changing the navigation menu item to the feature name, it is easier for users to identify where to update their preferences in the app.
Add instructions where to edit preferences after completing the initial onboarding: Mimicked patterns already present in Spotify in order to communicate important information that users might need and later remember.
Test
Design
Usability Testing | HiFi Wireframes
Remote usability testing was conducted on the high-fidelity wireframes in order to:
Evaluate ease of use, efficiency, and overall experience
Identify pain points and challenges users face when navigating screens/through task flows
Learn what changes can be made to improve user experience
Results & Feedback
All users were able to successfully complete each task. Scores for each rating increased indicating that revisions made were helpful for users. The second task’s rating still remained lower than the first task because Settings in the latest version of the Spotify app was difficult for even avid users to find. Once users were able to locate it, making the updates to their preferences were easy.
Average ease of Task 1: 9.8
Average ease of Task 2: 8.9
Average overall satisfaction: 9.6
*Rated on scale of 1 to 10
Deliver
Design
Prototype
Next Steps
Add more specific questions and choices for onboarding questionnaire to make playlists even more tailor-made
Types of music in Music Preferences
Length of playlist depending on user’s workout duration
Conclusion
This project allowed me to approach the situation differently as it was focused on an already existing platform with established branding and UX/UI. By having those barriers, it focused me on what I could and couldn’t do and made me creatively problem-solve by seeing where my potential solution(s) could plug into the app or where I had to simply let things be. Throughout my experience on this project, it made me realize that even a behemoth in the industry could still have issues with user experience and could even have inaccessible elements as part of their UI. Both of these points served as a challenge since I always want to make things accessible, especially if I know it’s not, and also make sure the user can reach their goals, which the existing UX may not support or other patterns might not exist in the app. So, learning to mitigate my own preferences versus what the existing platform’s architecture was a big lesson coming out of this project.
Flow 1: Onboarding
Flow 2: Changing User Preferences