Overview

Spotify Exchange is a conceptual feature I designed as part of a Product Management course.

At present, to share music via Spotify, you must break your current flow and be redirected to the app in which you wish to send the message. Spotify Exchange is a conceptual feature that I designed as a way to empower music enthusiasts to seamlessly share and recommend songs within the Spotify application, while driving the key business metric of app engagement by harnessing the power of social networks.

Through user research, I iterated on design concepts and landed on a high-fidelity concept.

Challenges

<aside> ❗ Spotify has a massive user base of over 600 million — how might I design a feature that a) adheres to the existing design patterns, b) solves a real user need, and c`) is easy for these existing users to use and adopt?

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Personas

Spotify has a double-sided market. My solution focuses on the Casual and Power Listeners.

User Needs

1. As an artist, I would like a way to share and monetize my art on an organized profile so that listeners can stream them easily and so that I have a source of income.
2. As a casual listener, I’d like help with finding songs that fit the mood so that I can enjoy music more at the given times I listen.
3. As a power listener, I’d like fresh recommendations so that I can find new songs I love listening to with ease.

Concept and Hypothesis Validation

I decided to focus on helping users discover new songs. To arrive at this conclusion, I performed secondary research that indicated Spotify recommendations were stale, and I also sent out a survey to understand users’ needs, pain points.

From the 17 survey responses, I found that over half the respondents had noted that it was “somewhat easy”, “neither easy nor hard” and “extremely difficult” to find new songs. Here are some quotes regarding users’ “least favorite part about Spotify: