Senior Design: Adding Personalization Features to Spotify
Overview
Over the course of my senior year of college, I worked towards completing this project. I spent the first semester conducting research, establishing a problem statement, and writing up a project proposal. I spent my final semester actually getting user feedback through a survey and interviews. Based on their feedback, which validated my problem statement, I created a high fidelity prototype to demonstrate the solution I came up with.
Problem Statement
I decided to stratify my problem statement into two main areas of focus:
Spotify is extremely lacking in customization options. Outside of creating playlists, the application gives users no opportunities to have control over the type of content that they see.
Adding songs to playlists is not as easy as it could be: users must navigate through multiple pages just to add a song to a playlist, and there is no way to quickly add a song to multiple playlists.
Research
Survey
Before doing any design work, I wanted to make sure I really understood the pain points of my users. Using Qualtrics to collect my data, I created a survey that focused on asking questions about personalization.
7 Questions, 101 Responses
Key Findings
- 59% of participants somewhat agreed that the content on their Spotify accurately represents their tastes.
- This response of “somewhat agree” tells me that there is room to improve upon the kind of content that Spotify advertises to its users.
- 85% of participants responded that they would like the ability to customize the content that they see on their homepage
- 66% of respondents said they would like the ability to rearrange, add, or delete content on their homepage.
- 40% of respondents said they would like the ability to choose different colored presets or themes to allow further customization of the application.
Interviews
With the hope of learning even more about the problems Spotify users are having, I conducted some open ended interviews. I chose to ask open ended questions because I wanted to give people the opportunity to talk about whatever problems they might be having with Spotify. I thought this would be a good way to gain some insight, and maybe even uncover some problems that I had not realized yet at this stage of the research.
5 Questions, 14 Interviews
Key Quotes
Affinity Diagram
After my interviews, I was left with a lot of qualitative data! I decided to create an affinity diagram as a way to digest all of this data. Some themes began to emerge after putting all the data in front of me.
The two themes with the most sticky notes were “content” and “navigation,” as you can see in the images below.
User Personas
Based off of my research, I created two personas to represent Spotify users.
Ideation
Sketches
When I sketch, I like to create multiple different iterations of the same screen I’m trying to design. This gives me a chance to try out different solutions. Then, I either pick the design that I think works best, or I’ll combine elements from multiple sketches to create the best possible solution.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Based on my sketches, I created low fidelity wireframes in Figma.
Homepage
Customize Content Page
Themes Page
Sort Homepage Modal
Music Player Page
Add to Playlist Modal
High Fidelity Wireframes
Improving upon my low fidelity wireframes, I created some high fidelity wireframes, also in Figma.
Homepage
Customize Content Page
Themes Page
Sort Homepage Modal
Music Player Page
Add to Playlist Modal
Solution
The final solution of this project was an interactive prototype created in Figma. Feel free to check out the prototype here.
Reflections
Design for the user!
Being a Spotify user myself definitely posed a challenge to this project. I had to keep reminding myself that even though I’m a Spotify user too, my job in this project isn’t to design something for myself! I made sure to keep looking at my problem statement, as well as my data collected from the survey and interviews, to make sure that I stayed on track.
What problems are worth fixing?
The problem statement I ended up with was an evolution of the problem statement I started with. In my project proposal phase, my problem statement was essentially an assumption, although it was backed up with research from my literature review. However, after conducting the survey and interviews, I needed to change my problem statement to better reflect my user feedback. I think that this was a great lesson for me in further understanding the importance of the user, and what they define as a problem.