Crafting solutions (or designer research, in other words)
Overview:
Launched back in 2008, Spotify is one of the most popular audio streaming services today, which offers digital copyrighted music and podcasts via freemium model. It’s available almost worldwide and it allows users to search music based on name, artist, genre and can create, edit and share playlists.
Problem statement:
Thinking about offering a better user experience, I will look about some user experiences to get a better idea about what they love from Spotify and what can be improved.
User & Audience:
For this exercise I chose to understand how people above 60+ years can use and enjoy Spotify.
Specifically I will tell you about Regina.
Who is she?
Regina is a 68 years old from Florida, who has a passion for music (she likes jazz, blues, soul but she is in love with classical music and Opera). She chose to drive cargo trucks because she loves road-trips and sing her heart out and this job allowed her to enjoy singing and listening to music while crossing the country.
She is not that used with new technologies, but her grandson introduced her to Spotify because she can play music all
What are her goals?
- Find songs more easily in her library.
- Organize her library by groups.
- Efficiently find songs added to her library when she has something specific in mind.
What does she want?
- Build up a permanent library of saved songs like the one she has in real life.
- Intuitive ways to filter her library.
- Control her classification.
What does she need?
- Get quality over quantity in her search results.
- Sort of group her songs by patterns.
- Accompaniment with the search.
What are her fears?
- Now knowing where to initiate her search since there are many entry points in the app.
- Scroll her entire library to find this one particular song.
- Listen to the same content at the top of her library.
- Have to build playlist that she will have to maintain overtime.
- Shuffle her entire library and end up with classical mixed with soul music.
People who are not used with some technologies can be challenging but if we need a product can be used by anyone, this implies that it needs to be intuitive at its most.
Now, this is the user route for Regina:
Given her pain points, it can be said that she’s really organized and she wants to be that way on Spotify using the less effort possible. Return the higher amount of songs that matches her criteria would be the priority.
Roles & Responsibilies
This is a team of one, so I need to recreate all the steps Regina take every time she uses Spotify in order to understand what’s going on and how to make Spotify user interface more intuitive.
Scope & constraints
For this exercise I had an span of two weeks to develop it.
What happened?
The challenge/Problem
Young users are the commonest ones in almost every service available on the Internet. Offering innovative services can boost a service number of users and popularity but offer too complicated innovation can be overwhelming for some users. Making Spotify a pleasant experience, even when the user just wants to enjoy a personal music collection.
Research and discoveries:
Given Regina’s love for road trips, we can emphasize on Spotify’s versions for mobile phones and tablets.
On desktop versions the highlighted Search input referrs to the entire Spotify collection while in the mobile and tablet versions, there’s a specific option on the menu to do this.
It will be interesting to know why Regina doesn’t use the New playlist button. Doesn’t she know that option exists? Or she’s marking Like on songs while driving or using a voice assistant, like Alexa, Google Home or Siri? The same issue can be applied while looking for the Filter by option at Songs you like section.
There’s plenty of options for exploring new music (the This is playlists, mixes, and so on) but going deeper on a genre or artist, based on favorite music only doesn’t have that many options.
Sketches
Given the results of the research, these are some sketches for possible solutions:
You can add some options at first, but what about creating an option for people that wants listening to the music that they truly love?
Choosing a solution
Given the pain points for Regina, I chose the Connoiseur mode, that will allow her to create playlists or just play music based on clear parameters like genre, artists, albums or all together. It will have some additional dialogs for establishing criteria, and it would be a checkbox for exporting results in a playlist.
An user flowchart
Thinking in Regina’s goals of going deeper while listening to her favorite music, the Connoiseur mode would let her to be really specific at selecting what to hear, from which artist or which genre and what period of time, not only a specific year.
On first place, she could take the Sort/Group option if she would like to hear all her liked music in an organized way. She would be able to sort her music using the artist, genre and album criteria. There will be an option for group using a sub criteria for grouping by, besides the sorting, and there will be a small announcement between groups.
On the other hand, the Magnify option, would let her to create personalized playlist choosing artists, genres and periods of time. The users can choose another subcriteria (like choosing a period of time and after that an artist or various artists, for example), select maximum and minimum time for playlists and the option for exporting its results into a permanent playlist.
