With the requirements from project brief and research plan in hand, I started research phase to fulfill following goals:
I conducted market analysis to familiarize myself with music streaming industry. I gathered data on user demographics and I also researched spotify’s old messaging feature which was discontinued due to low engagement.
Next I moved on to competitor analysis to identify Spotify’s competitors and to determine their strengths, weaknesses, similarities and differences.
Based on my secondary research, I created provisional personas to begin thinking about who might make up Spotify’s customer base. It helped me to focused on the question I wanted to ask in interviews.
After the secondary research, I developed list of questions and conducted series of interviews with people who were either spotify or other music streaming app users. These interviews helped me in gaining understanding of people’s experiences, preferences and frustrations related to music streaming apps. Assumptions I hoped to prove or disprove were
After completing interviews I gathered and organised all information to look for insights. I wrote down responses on sticky notes and mapped them out into says, does, thinking and feeling. This method allowed me to discover trends and patterns from which I was able to draw insights and discover the needs of my users.
Insights
• User follow artists and stay up to date with them through social media.
•Users use other ways to share music with people outside the app.
• Users like to discuss about their shared music with other people..
Needs
• Users need to be able to stay up to date with artists within app.
• Users need a way to share music directly within the app.
• Users need a way to talk to other people within app.
Using all the qualitative data that I gathered in my research process, I created primary persona Emily.
Using my persona's goals and needs, I develop Point of View statements and translated them into How Might We questions. This allowed me to define the problem before thinking about solutions.
After a short brainstorming session I compared initial business goals with goals of the user to identify what’s common between them. This helped me to focus on the features that satisfy both business and user.
After that I created a product roadmap outlining features and metrics. This helped me organize my thoughts and prioritize what features to focus on.
After outlining the features and priorities in product roadmap, I created a site map outlining spotify’s current app and incorporated the social features I designed.
Once site structure was established, I created a user flow to determine how Emily (primary persona) will navigate through the app to achieve her goals using new social features. This helped me to ensure that information is organized in a way that is intuitive to the user.
I established UI requirements for key screens based on user flow. Then I began sketching low fidelity wireframes to quickly visualize how new feature will be incorporated in existing layout.
To show how the visual design will be integrated into the current Spotify app I referenced spotify’s design patterns and style guide and re-created some of the app’s screens in adobe XD.
I created prototype in Adobe XD, then I conducted in-person and remote usability test with five users who were recruited in a public places. I provided the users with a detailed scenario and had them complete a series of simple tasks.
After testing my prototype I created affinity map to organize responses and observations. This helped me in checking for patterns and driving insights, from which I constructed design recommendations. I listed out design recommendation in the order of high priority to low priority.
Insights
• Users want to see their notification somewhere other than user profile.
• Users want easy way to access their notifications.
• Users focus more on top part of the screen to find something important.
Design Recommendations
• Create a section "your activity" on top of home screen, that will give the notifications to user about any music shared to him or any updates in playlists.
• Remove notification sign from "my library" icon and user profile icon.
• Remove section of "friend's activity" from home screen.
Based on design recommendations in my affinity map, I updated the wireframes and prototype.
I wanted to make sure that my social feature blend in harmoniously within existing app. For this reason I referenced Spotify brand guideline and created moodboard focusing on social features.
Next, I created UI kit to document the design patterns and components and to ensure consistent application of elements across the product.
Adding a new feature in already existing and well established product had a lot of constraints. However, it provided great opportunity to learn and would influence the way I will approach similar projects in future. Talking directly with the users was very beneficial since it allowed me to gain deep understanding how people connect with other people. Despite some usability issues, I received positive response from users about the features I imagined for this project.
With more time I would like to run another set usability testing to test if feature is more intuitive and I would also add additional feature outlined in product roadmap.
