Joe Loera
Joe Loera
Has a song ever made you think of someone else? Has a song ever evoked a memory or emotion that you wanted to share with a friend, colleague, or the world? To many, sharing a song feels like they’re giving a gift. When they gift that song, they’re hopeful it’ll bring out an emotion or feeling just as it did for them. There’s also a feeling of anticipation that the receiver of the song will react. Whether the receiver sends a song back, comments, or simply emotes, having that reciprocation that the song that was sent was listened to makes you feel acknowledged and appreciated. I soon realized that Spotify, the world’s largest music screaming service, has very limited functionality when it comes to sharing a song. Let’s fix that!
To create a satisfying and simple way to share songs with others when using Spotify
Solo Conceptual Case Study
User Experience Designer
Jul 2022 – Aug 2022
~4 Weeks (Part time)
Listens to Music through:
Listens to Music through:
Now that we understand how and why our users share music and the obstacles they face when doing so...
... let's further empathize with them and make our research findings more digestible and scannable.
Let’s take the insights we’ve discovered during our interviews and condense them into a persona that lays out our interviewees’ habits and pain points to make them easier to digest.
It’s obvious that Deandra is a huge fan of music and enjoys sharing it. But what does Deandre go through when she shares a song? Let’s breakdown the high and low points of sharing a song with Deandra to see where the experience can be improved.
People share music for different reasons or different intentions and we cannot treat them all the same. Let’s take what we learned from user interviews and create an additional personality to further hone our future design.
Derrick has a different reason to share music than Deandra, but with the same purpose; to share and promote music and the artists who create it.
We now know what effect sharing music has on our users and that Spotify can have a simple and more meaningful way to share music.
But what functionality will we implement to bring such an experience to the audio lovers who want to share music through Spotify?
We need ideas fast! Using three rounds of Crazy 8’s, we will quickly come up with some ideas on what functionality we can implement. We will choose the option that will not only provide a more positive sharing experience, but can be implemented in a timely manner.
We will give users the ability to not just “Share a Song” but to “Dedicate a Song”. Calling it a dedication makes the song more personal and meaningful to both the sender and receiver of the song. To make it even more special, we will package the song in the form of a gift. This makes the receiver feel like they’ve a gift just them, adding even more of a personal touch. We will ascertain the brand ideals that Spotify follow.
Let’s start building! We want our user to have the a simple and unintrusive experience when sharing a dedication.
Using Spotify assets, we will integrate our Dedication song sharing where you would normally choose a sharing option. We don’t want it to blend in flawlessly with the app. We will give it a background color that differentiates it from the rest of the iconography and carry that color throughout the rest of the dedication process.
We have a MVP! Let’s get it into the hands of users to see where what’s working and what need improvement.
We tested three users. Two of them were those who we interviewed since they were passionate about sharing music and we don’t want that to go to waste!
Simple. Share a dedication of the song you’re listening to to a friend of your collegues, Jim Trenton.
Usability Test 1 Revisions
Based on the results and observations of our first usability test, we have ideas on what can be improved with our initial design.