Music sharing needs a new awakening, and it starts with us. Vinyl sales, which in recent years have once again become popular, have increased in revenue — but lagging way behind other forms of distribution. It is clear that streaming music has become a primary source of how we access music. But what are we listening to and how are we discovering it?
Business Goals
BACKGROUND
Spotify is a music, podcast, and video streaming service. Music can be browsed or searched for via various parameters, such as artist, album, genre, playlist name, or record label. Users can create, edit and share playlists, share tracks on social media, and make joint playlists with other users. As a capstone project, Spotify and Designlab have collaborated to create a new feature for the existing Spotify music app that would increase in-app user engagement. Spotify would like to increase their in-app engagement and allow users to be creative with their already existing content. Since , Spotify has announced multiple significant updates to the service that have truly broadened their feature set. They launched Discover Weekly, Spotify Run, Spotify Original Content, and the ability to find and book concert tickets to see your favorite artist live. Create a feature that allows users to remix songs from Spotify's vast music library with preconfigured remix filters and share their unique content with the world. I am following a user-centered approach, allowing myself to be guided by user research and frequently iterating on each step according to newly accumulated data. I started out my process by doing market research on current apps and features that allow users to be creative with music.
The Home Screen
I was provided a great opportunity to do a reverse engineering practice of Spotify. I spent two weekends to take things apart, understand how it works and try to improve the user experience. This practice is purely based on my own research and my personal usage.
With the requirements from project brief and research plan in hand, I started research phase to fulfill following goals:. I conducted market analysis to familiarize myself with music streaming industry. It helped me to focused on the question I wanted to ask in interviews. After the secondary research, I developed list of questions and conducted series of interviews with people who were either spotify or other music streaming app users. Assumptions I hoped to prove or disprove were. After completing interviews I gathered and organised all information to look for insights. I wrote down responses on sticky notes and mapped them out into says, does, thinking and feeling. This method allowed me to discover trends and patterns from which I was able to draw insights and discover the needs of my users.
