A major plus for Spotify users that love discovering new music is the ability to choose playlists based on a certain mood or activity. For users who don’t necessarily have the time or the knowledge of enough songs to create specific playlists for certain activities, Spotify does most of the heavy lifting.
When Ineed to play music for a certain event, I want to have the correct playlist ready to go so I can save time coming up with songs.
But I can’t do that well because:
I don’t have enough time to comb through the songs that I do know and come up with a playlist
I don’t know enough songs to be able to come up with a non-repetitive playlist
My musical tastes are not diverse enough to have a playlist ready to go for each event
Strategy: The ability to have a playlist ready to go for any event. My current all-inclusive playlist isn’t appropriate for every situation and creating such playlists would be time intensive. Spotify solves this need by creating diverse playlists that cater to many users who need a“chill” playlist when hanging out with friends that suits their specific music interests.
Scope: To properly solve this problem, Spotify needs to be able to not only cater to a diverse set of musical genres, but also needs to offer the ability to bookmark the playlist so it is available immediately. This is done seamlessly by allowing the user to either bookmark specific songs in the playlist or merely following or saving the entire playlist. Following the ability to save the playlists is the ability to access the playlists which is achieved by the“My Library” tab.
While Spotify does allow for a large diversity playlists, there is still some ambiguity about what lies in each of these tabs.“Mellow” can be defined differently by different users. This may seem like a good idea because it forces the user to try out different playlists, this can potentially push the user away from this feature if they have to guess every time they need a playlist.
Structure: The first criterion was allowing for the diversity of genres. This is easily done using large buttons that list the overarching genres in the“Browse” tab.
As seen in the image above, given a very niche playlist, Spotify allows you to“save” or“follow” the playlist so that in future instances in which the playlist is needed again, it can be more easily accessed.
Skeleton:
Finding Genres
The UI for Spotify is generally very intuitive. A seen in the past three screen captures, the user is given as much information as possible about the genre options through visual aids. The layout is clean and easy to navigate. My only point of concern is the transition between the“Go to Radio” option shown on the last screen capture and the Radio tab. The difference between the purpose of the playlist and the Radio is not entirely clear to me as a user and thus renders the Radio useless if I am already listening to the playlist.
Playing Music at the User’s Convenience
The saved playlists that can be accessed at any given point can be found in the“My Library” tab. This tab, however, is not as well formatted as the“browse” tab is because it is not as easy to traverse the saved playlists or songs without seeing interference from other options such as“albums” which are redundant given the primary purpose of Spotify.
Surface:
Black Background
The black background of the entire app amplifies the functionality of the application. It makes each of the album covers and the playlist covers pop out bringing focused attention to each one of them.
Icons
Describing different types of genres through simplified icons, especially in combination with the black background, creates for a simplified look which strongly decreases the overwhelming feeling of potentially looking through many different types of playlists. In comparison with the first screen capture, this online mood-based radio is not as easy to navigate.
I believe though, that merely using an icon and the number of followers for a playlist, is not sufficient to properly convey to the user the contents of the playlist.
Design Improvements and Constraints
One improvement would be to add 2-3 well known artists that are included in that playlist. This would decrease some of the ambiguity that is still present when traversing playlists. An obvious constraint to this is that by allowing for the ambiguity, foot traffic is increased across the application.
Assignment 1: Understanding the product
People Problem Format
Redesigning Feature Spaces