Spotify Concept: Discovering and Sharing Music with Friends
Like many other music listeners, Spotify has become an integral part of my daily life. With the amount of songs we circulate through each day, whether it’s while listening independently or with others at a function, we are bound to encounter random new songs we like or songs that remind us of others.
People want to share songs they love with their friends so everyone can listen to and discover new music together. However, this is difficult because:
- People resort to external sources to send music to each other.
- People resort to external sources to identify a song that is currently playing.
- If someone asks for the name of a song that is currently playing, they usually forget about it since it is too inconvenient to look up and add in the moment and have to search for it later (if they remember).
Understanding How People Use Spotify
I began by interviewing 6 Spotify users, asking them to walk me through how they would typically use Spotify and how they would discover and share music. Through these interviews, I discovered:
- Users mainly listen to their own music library.
- Users share songs mostly through text messages — either by naming the song and artist or sending a link from Spotify.
- Users use Shazam or Spotify’s Shazam feature to discover songs they like that are currently playing.
- Users will either add a new song they like immediately after hearing it OR forget about it and search for it later if it comes to mind again.
Based on my user research, I realized that the real issue wasn’t discovering and sharing music, but rather getting to the point where users actually added a newly discovered song to their own library or actually listened to a song their friend sent them.
Ideation
Through numerous explorations with my friends Casey Le and Kenneth Dao, we identified two main areas of improvement:
- Creating a Sense of Community: How might we make it easier to share and access music from others within Spotify?
- Integrating Music Discovery with the Listening Experience: How might we make it easier to discover and add newly discovered songs to our own library?
With these ideas in mind, I explored some potential solutions — such as group chats, in-app sharing, in-app Shazam, and listening parties — through low-fidelity sketches.
After analyzing the pros and cons of each feature, I decided to move forward with Feature 2 (In-App Sharing) and Feature 3 (In-App Shazam), as they dealt most directly with the ideas of community and discovery without taking away from Spotify’s primary purpose— to listen to music.
Medium-Fidelity Explorations
In-App Shazam
By bringing a Shazam feature into Spotify, users no longer have to switch between apps and manually search for a song they’ve heard after figuring out the name. This is because song identification and actionable song options (e.g. like, add to playlist, share) are all in one place, making it easier for users to add newly identified songs to their own library.
For these two flows, I explored different entry points and designs for the identification process. I pursued the first flow because the entry point was more intuitive, as it was next to other methods of searching for a song, and the screen during the identifying process provided clearer directions, options, and feedback to users.
In-App Sharing (Sending)
Providing a way for users to share songs with friends directly in Spotify cuts out the need for texting as a middle-man. Users no longer need to text a link or the name of a song and hope their friend actually stops what they’re doing to click on it or look it up themselves to listen to it. Instead, the shared song is already in the same place users listen to music, giving them more of an incentive to check it out while they’re already there.
Out of these three explorations relating to different ways of integrating in-app sharing, a messaging feature, and feedback systems, I decided to go with the second one. In the second flow, the composition of the sharing screen (with in-app sharing occupying most of the space) was most suggestive of it being the primary sharing method, encouraging users to share songs through Spotify before turning to external sources. The feedback was also most effective in this flow, as it clearly confirmed details about the action that had been completed without being too invasive.
After talking to some users, I found that the messaging part of the in-app sharing feature was unnecessary since it related more to social networking than the music listening experience. If users wanted to send messages to their friend, they would simply go to apps designed primarily for messaging (e.g. iMessage, Facebook Messenger), so I decided to move forward without this element.
In-App Sharing (Receiving)
On the receiving end, I wanted to explore how an interface encourage users to follow through with listening to a song their friends have sent them. To do this, I tested out different notification methods, a reaction feature, and a feed for compiling shared songs.
Based on user feedback, I realized that similarly to the messaging feature users didn’t really feel the need for reactions within Spotify, so I focused on the notification and feed aspects instead.
The full screen notification from the first iteration would appear when users initially open Spotify, while the drop down notification from the second iteration would appear if a user was already in the app. Since having a full screen notification pop up every time a friend shared a song would inevitably become annoying and take away from the listening experience, I decided it would be best to have it appear less frequently.
The feed then becomes a space where users can find songs friends have sent them or that they have discovered through the in-app Shazam. Its organization into three sections — Recently shared with you, Friend playlists, and From Shazam — allows users to easily navigate to find what they want.
Final Flows
In-App Shazam
In-App Sharing (Sending)
In-App Sharing (Receiving)
Friend and Discovery Feed
Final Prototype for All Discovery and Sharing Features
Conclusion
As one of the top music streaming services, Spotify has been highly successful in providing an accessible platform for users to listen to the music they enjoy. I hope that In-App Shazam, In-App Sharing, and Friend and Discovery Feed features can add to the Spotify experience by streamlining the process of incorporating new music into our libraries, making it easier to remember to save newly discovered songs we love and encourage us to actually listen to the songs our friends have shared with us, creating a more interactive listening experience among the Spotify community.
Thank you Cornell AppDev for this experience!
This was a case study for Intro to Digital Product Design. I am in no way affiliated with Spotify.
