Jul 23, 2017
Spotify: Introducing a New Feature That Lets YOU Be a DJ
Do you love listening to music but are sick of hearing the same songs over and over again? It can be difficult to know where to seek the inspiration that will lead to new and exciting music, but with this new feature that allows you to listen, play and collaborate in real time on Spotify, you’ll have a constant source of unexpected music right at your fingertips.
Project Brief
Our General Assembly UXDI team was provided with a Spotify project brief. Even though Spotify already has a wide range of features, they wanted to create a new one that would allow users to collaborate, DJing their select tracks with other users in real time.
Specific Features to Include:
· DJs should be able to select tracks and take turns playing songs
· DJs should be able to capture and share their DJ sets
· Listeners should be able to join rooms and listen to live DJ sets
· Listeners should be able to provide feedback about the DJ sets
Project Kick-Off
Our team of 3 kicked off this project by discussing our work styles and strengths/weaknesses, assign roles and develop a project plan with planned out time blocks per day to ensure we were tracking on schedule to meet our presentation date.
Empathy Map
Because Spotify is such an established platform that our team was already familiar with, we came to the table with our initial assumptions on the mindset of Spotify users. We put these assumptions into an empathy map to help us set a base of what we thought our users were feeling, thinking and experiencing.
Spotify Today
Although we started the project with our initial assumptions, we knew the key next step would be to dive deeper, starting with where Spotify is today.
Business Model - Freemium. Users can access content for free, but need to have a paid subscription in order to use all of the features.
User Base - 140M monthly active users, with 50M of those as paid subscribers (https://www.statista.com/statistics/244995/number-of-paying-spotify-subscribers/)
Mission Statement - “Give people access to all the music they want, all the time in a completely legal and accessible way.”
Competitive Landscape
Once we completed the business analysis of Spotify, we wanted to put that information into the context of their competitors (Apple Music, WeFunk Radio, SoundCloud, Flo Music and FB Live).
Below is the rationale for why we chose thees competitors, a feature comparison and our key takeaways.
We chose Apple Music because it was the closest to Spotify in that they are both one-stop shops that offer a wide variety of content and features. We wanted to compare these one-stop shops against more specialized platforms, such as WeFunk Radio (weekly radio mix-show) and SoundCloud (open platform that directly connects creators and their fans). SoundCloud is currently in a financial predicament, which we think could be a good opportunity for us to obtain some of their current base with a new feature.
Flo Music is a relatively new app that was helpful to analyze as they are currently the only music platform that offers users the ability to stream and collaborate in real-time, which is the feature we are working to add to Spotify. While they stand out because of this feature, it is currently their only feature and therefore it is a very limited app for users.
We also chose FB Live, even though they are not a music platform, so that we could analyze their live streaming feature. We found stats that stated engagement and viewing significantly increased when activity was in FB Live. This shows that having content that is in real-time is something that users are definitely interested in and are more likely to engage with.
“Facebook Live videos are watched 3x longer than videos that aren’t live anymore”
“Users comment on Facebook Live videos at 10x the rate of regular videos”
[source:http://mediakix.com/2017/03/facebook-live-statistics-video-streaming-to-know/#gs.qEt2Fto]
User Research
Once we had a good understanding of where Spotify and their competitors are today, we wanted to learn more about the audience.
We first aligned on our user research goals and defined the user groups:
User Research Goal: How are people interacting with music online
Primary User: Someone who wants to share music with friends
Secondary User: Solo music listener (open to listening to other people’s music, but not as much proactively sharing theirs)
This information aided us in developing our screener survey that we developed in TypeForm and sent out via the Slack #take-my-survey channel and our personal FB pages.
Based on the responses to the screener survey, we recruited 6 participants that met our criteria as either a primary or secondary user to interview.
User Interview Discussion Guide
These questions mainly had to do with the users’ online music behavior, their pain points and their moments of joy.
They key takeaways from our user interviews were that 4 out of 6 users felt the biggest challenge with online music is repetitiveness and that they find about about new music through friends.
“I do feel inclined to share new music. New music starts a conversation.”
“I like to be surprised when I’m listening to music..What’s the next song?”
Storyboard
We then developed a storyboard as a way to capture the feelings the majority of our users expressed.
Affinity Map
We also organized all of the observations into an affinity map to see if any patterns emerged and ended up with 4 different buckets as follows.
1. Finding New Music “I actively seek new music.”
2. Tech “I choose platforms based on their content.”
3. Social “I like to share music with friends.”
4. Solo “I listen to music to isolate myself.”
Personas
After synthesizing our research, we crafted personas to bring our users to life. This tool was great in not only allowing us to communicate what we learnt in our research but also ensured we put the users in the forefront.
Problem Statement
Based on all of our findings from user research, the problem statement that we landed on is ‘Music lovers need a way to be actively engaged because they seek the thrill of being part of a community.’
We referred back to this problem statement throughout our design process to ensure our designs were meeting the users’ needs.
User Flows
We also created user flows based on the persona we were designing for. This tool allowed us to plot how our users, Sally and Ted, were able to complete their “happy path” or route to complete the given scenario and informed our initial design iterations.
Design Decisions
After our personas were defined and we were aligned on the types of features they need, which were unexpected new music and an effective way to share music socially, we had a good foundation to get back to the brief from Spotify of creating a feature that allows users in real time to listen, collaborate, play and comment.
Going into the design process, we wanted to ensure this new feature was seamlessly integrated into the current functionality and navigation since users are so familiar with the Spotify interface. We also adhered to the Spotify brand guidelines to ensure a seamless look/feel.
Final Design
The solution that we developed to solve for this brief was a new feature called ‘Live Sets’ with an accompanying new icon. Below are the net new ‘Live Set’ screens as well as how we incorporated this new feature into already existing Spotify screens.
Evolution of Key Screens
We started our design process with paper prototypes to get an initial read of how users were interacting with this new feature. We tested the paper prototype with 1 Spotify user at GA and addressed the feedback from this user test in the second iteration that we developed in Sketch.
We placed the second iteration design in InVision to create a rough prototype and did further testing in a usability lab with 3 people. We addressed that feedback in our 3rd iteration, which was mid-high fidelity before finalizing the key screens.
Major Changes:
Across the different rounds of user testing, we found that users wanted to see the song currently playing AND who the host was, so we put together an amalgamation of both in the 3rd iteration. After finalizing the high fidelity version, we referred back to the Spotify brand guidelines and learned that currently Spotify does not allow any element to overlap album art so we would need to work closely with the Client to see if this is feasible.
We also removed the search bar since no one used it and replaced it with an ‘Add Live Set’ icon as many users expected there to be a way to start a new Live Set directly from this page.
Major Changes:
Across the different rounds of testings, our users were able to easily identify all of the main features and therefore, we did not have to make any major changes to this screen. We did remove the ‘+’ icon that Spotify uses to save songs as many users were confused on what that icon did in the context of this screen. Users are still able to access that feature through the ‘Song Options’
What’s Next?
While our team feels the 3rd high fidelity version is in a good place and we have succeeded in developing a MVP, there are definitely next steps that we would like to continue to explore.
Further Testing & Iteration — See how users utilize the new “Add Live Set” feature in the “Featured Live Sets” screen
Accommodate Multiple Paths to Creative Live Sets — Ensure all types of Spotify users who use the app differently are able to find and use this feature
Social Interaction Increase — Add the ability for users to ‘like’ Live Sets and respond in the chat with music-centric emojis/GIFs/sound bites
