Spotify Messenger Case Study

UX Designer

Product Designer

UI Designer

Adobe Illustrator

Figma

Miro

Spotify Messenger

Directly Sharing Songs, Artists, and More Between Users (UI/UX Case Study)

INTRODUCTION

Spotify Messenger is an imagined feature for Spotify that allows users to directly message songs, artists, and playlists on the app to their friends. By providing an option to primarily share content through Spotify, this will effectively remove the need to send a message via secondary apps and further enhance the collaborative listener's experience.

MY ROLE

UI/UX Designer, Research, Ideation, and Prototyping

PROJECT SCOPE

Sole Designer, 4 weeks

TOOLS

Figma, Miro, Procreate, Qualtrics, Photoshop

Problem

Sending a song on Spotify can sometimes be inconvenient with having to switch between apps.

Identifying Pain Points

After surveying 38 Spotify users, results revealed a common sentiment that there is a limit to the connectivity on the platform despite features like Jam, collaborative playlists, and adding friends.

Synthesizing Feedback

When asked, "Do you consider Spotify more as a platform for yourself or a way to connect with friends?", insights convey that users find that listening to music is a shared experience rather than a completely solo experience; however, beyond what the platform currently features, Spotify lacks a direct way to connect with friends.

"Music highlights common interests, tastes, and beliefs. For young people especially, it’s instrumental in catalyzing and deepening existing relationships. I would like for it to be a platform to connect with friends, as I really like the friend activity and all the opportunities to share playlists/collab on Spotify, but I feel like no one really uses it that way.” - Anonymous Spotify Listener

01

Music discovery happens through people's recommendations.

75% of users discover music through friends and family, while 97% of users find new music through social media.

02

Users are constantly sharing music.

75% of users often share a song/artist theyre listening to 1-3 times a week, while 82% often receive a song/artist 1-3 times a week. Overall, all users share music mainly through text, but 52% share through Instagram.

03

Users utilize the collaborative features Spotify already provides, but want more.

97% of users use collab playlist, 77% use jam session, 65% look at friend activity, but 86% are likely to utilize a feature that would allow them to directly connect with others through the app.

How Might We…

Provide a seamless direct content sharing experience within the Spotify community?

Feature Strategizing

From analyzing the market and targeting my research on the most popular music streaming competitors, I found that most apps besides Soundcloud did not offer a sharing feature directly within their platforms. This could be a key opportunity to further differentiate Spotify and emphasize the brand's mission for everyone to connect. and exchange music with each other.

Youtube Music

Youtube Music has the user share the content that they want via secondary apps or by copying the link.

Apple Music

Apple Music is integrated within the Apple ecosystem, so the app's content only makes sense to be shared primarily through messages.

Soundcloud

Soundcloud is the only music streaming app that I found including a direct content sharing feature. After adding a friend on the app, users are able to share songs, artists, and playlists along with more attachments to their message.

However, I found that the experience could have been easier as users are only able to share the content with friends one at a time.

Interface Interactions

3 rounds of concept testing led to the option to share with Spotify friends seamlessly within the share button and users are able to select more than one friend at a time to send their selected content.

Initially, I separated the options to either send to friends through Spotify or to share externally; however, since they were sharing to friends regardless, it made more sense for the direct feature to fall under the same menu.

Also, at first, I extended the list of friends vertically, but later opted for a horizontal scroll similar to the list of secondary apps featured within share.

Integrating New Flow

Current flow stays the same in order to minimize interruptions and reduce learning curve.

Minimum paths to desired result

Putting It All Together

Integrating the new feature into Spotify's existing design system to maintain the brand's experience.

Proposed Solution

Spotify Messenger connects you to all of your friends without ever interrupting your app experience.

Testing Impacts

Feedback results showed that the new feature reduces interruption time on Spotify and greatly enhances overall collaborative listener's experience

01

98% of users were able to complete the flow with minimal errors and required steps.

02

Successfully improved the rate of interruption time on Spotify by reducing the time by 65-75%

03

New feature felt complimentary to the rest of the current Spotify collaborative user's listening experience.

Project Takeaways

As an avid Spotify user myself, I always found it exciting to see the new creative ways the platform engages users to interact with one another. With this idea, I could also see an opportunity for artists to utilize Spotify Messenger as a way to connect with fans, similar to a lot of artists recently having fans sign up for text message alerts on upcoming releases. Overall this project allowed me to imagine what would be the next best feature that I would like to see the brand challenge itself to create.