Client

Student Project at UX Academy, Designlab

Role

Product Design (research, design, prototype, testing)

Competitive Analysis

Music apps have come a long way, from being solely used to play songs from the albums to owning their podcasts and radio stations. There are plenty of music apps available on App Store and Google Play, amongst which I decided to study JioSaavn, Gaana, Amazon Prime Music, and Apple Music to study the comparisons.

Findings

Interviews

I conducted remote interviews with music app users (14+ years old). I recruited users who were not only using Spotify but also any other app of their choice. I wanted to find out about the other apps, if they used any and why they preferred that app. It would give me the advantage of finding out which feature Spotify could include.

GOALS

• How does Spotify or any other music app help improve the user’s life?

• What influences the user’s taste of music?

• What are the ways used to discover new music?

• Would social features (like commenting, messaging, etc.) in a music app be valuable addition?

• What features, apart from playing songs and creating playlists, did the users find useful in improving the connection with the music?

I worked upon a questionnaire based on the goals which I could refer to while interviewing the users.

 Findings

Building Empathy

Meet Nathan

Using the interview results, I created a target group profile Nathan(19), to better empathize with the requirements and needs of the audience I will be designing for.

Defining the persona for this project was one of the fun experiences. I could 100% relate with the pain of someone who hears a fantastic song or tune somewhere, but does not know which song it is. Hence, I decided to include that in my storyboard later.

I learned one more important thing from this phase - STUDY THE APP IN DETAIL. Despite one of my persona's needs to get live events notifications, I realized Spotify already had that feature. All you had to do was switch on the push notification for the same. Whew! Saved me much time I was about to waste.

Storyboard

I created a storyboard to demonstrate a how the Spotify’s new feature ‘ID Song’ helps Nathan to identify a song playing in the background.

Sketches and low fidelity wireframes

I started rapid design thinking by sketching out my ideas. I added a new icon to display ‘Friend Activity’ on Spotify mobile application, although, this feature is already available in Spotify desktop application. My intention of introducing this feature in the mobile app was based on the interview insight - Users are interested in their friends’ choice of music.

The second feature that I introduced is “ID My Song“. I decided to add it to the main navigation for easy and quick access for the users.

Instead of using paper and pencil method, I used Adobe Photoshop and my Wacom to do the sketches. I thoroughly enjoyed copying and pasting stuff, instead of redrawing the same thing again and again :D

UI Design

It was a great deal of work to match the appearance of an already well-designed application, especially the style of icons and the overall typography. Spotify has that unique, linear, and smooth style for icons. Not to forget, minimalist too! I have tried to create the same that would at least attempt to blend in.

Prototype

You can view the Spotify prototype here.

Usability Testing

The test objectives were to test the navigation and see if the new features added are easily accessible to the users. While performing the test, I analyzed the users’ behavior and also received the feedback.

Findings

• The features blend in well with the app.

• The ‘ID Song’ feature makes the app experience complete.

• The animation in ‘ID My Song’ could use more perfection.

Because I did not have to start designing the application from scratch, I feel the solution was precise, compared to the other problem statements I have worked before. The project was fun due to the nature of the app, and challenging as well at the same time. If I had more time, I could work on the animation in the prototype and make it perfect!