Social Feature Designed for Spotify
This case study breaks down how a team and I designed a new social feature for the iOs Spotify app.
(Summer 2023)
My role was as a team member in this SPRINT project.
Project Overview
We were tasked to ideate, prototype, and test a solution to a problem. Using the 5-day project management tool SPIRNT we decided to create a new social feature on the already existing Spotify app to connect thousands of music enthusiasts.
The Problem
There is a large product need in the music listening world searching for a sense of community brought by concerts, parties, weddings, music festivals, and even listening to the radio station. In this case, we identified that music is powerful on so many platforms, and because we listen to music, create playlists, and recommend songs to each other every day that there is so much opportunity in music. Throughout the years we have all seen music streaming apps become all the craze like Apple Music, Pandora, Prime Music, and sound cloud, so we decided to use one of these apps to propose our idea of making them more social with Spotify.
The Solution
The method we used to create this project was by collaborating using the Sprint method. We were led through this process with the book “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days” by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz. This method essentially takes 5/9 work days but we took each day and tackled it each week. We collaborated on figjam and truly by following the process, and applying our best knowledge, and skills were able to create this prototype as a group in a short period of time. To get over obstacles we would have a facilitator that would make all the final big decisions overseeing the process and the decider to break any tie-breakers and weigh in more on big decisions.
In short, this is what we concluded at the end of each sprint “day”.
Monday
- We decided on our long-term goal together that would help us work on this process in a similar and general direction as a group and would help guide us in the future if we would find ourselves veering off during the process.
“We want to create more ways for users to interact, share, and explore new music.”
- We came up with sprint questions that we eventually narrowed down to two that we would center our focus around.
“Will we be able to host this new functionality within the same app?”
“Will we be able to integrate this seamlessly without adding too much clutter?”
- We spoke to experts to come up with How Might We Questions to help us think critically about what we are creating and why.
“How might we make this feature inclusive and accessible?”
“How might we allow users to add more personalization and creativity?”
- Lastly, we created a note-in map that is like a version of a user journey map that helped us create the first visual steps of a user through our idea.
Tuesday
- We did lightning demos where we would present our inspiration from other products and features that we would want to use in ours.
- We separately and anonymously sketched our ideal product/prototype for the solution.
Wednesday
- We would then vote for the best feature of our sketches to combine ideas to create a storyboard that would essentially be a wireframe for our prototype.
The Results
Thursday
- We created the prototype using Figma using the wireframe and communicating for guidance.
Friday
- We conducted user tests/interviews to help gain feedback on our product and what we could change to better the product for the user. We gained a lot of insight here. Learning from the user allowed us to think where we could go back and tweak the design. This project could turn into a fully functioning realistic feature on Spotify but for that work would have to be done on the features to make them sellable(the whole point of the sprint is to find out if the idea is worth the investment). What I took away is that with the right team, work ethic, and perspective projects like this are manageable, save time, money, and energy, to ultimately give potential to great new ideas.