Designer language — research | Spotify

This blog post is based on a Holberton School Full Stack Web Specialization pair project, the Spotify UX case study. The goal is to understand how designers work to solve a UX problem and writing a UX case study that explains your discoveries.

The project splits in 3 parts: Research, Prototype and Validate

Research

First, we have to do our research to identify what kind of user is our improvement going to, and make their experience more delightful while using the app.

In this case we have Regina, read below to know her more:

Our research team has collected some data on Regina, a user with little knowledge of technology, who struggles to manage new tools to organize her music. As you can see above she really likes classical, jazz, blues and soul music and her grandson wants her to change from CD’s to spotify. In the next image you’ll see Regina exact steps for playing music, as well as the issues she faces:

As you can see, Regina feels extremely dissapointed when she starts searching for something to play. She always experience an endless scroll due to the amount of music she has, and since she is not really familiar with technology, she doesnt always search in the right place. Besides, as expected she doesnt know how to create playlists so she often gets frustrated when a song finishes and another with a different genre starts.

Sketch

Regina is experiencing a lot of struggle while she uses the app, leading her to uncomfortable feelings towards it, and thinking if she should go back to her old but gold CD sets. Every app wants as most users as possible, and that’s not happening if a certain group of people can’t manage to use the app properly for what they need.

For this reason, we have generate some ideas to what it seems are the three main struggles Regina has while using the app, hoping it might help a certain group of people with the same issues.

As shown in the last picture, we clearly indentified the first conflict with the app, which was at the time she looks up for a song. Not only she faces an endless scroll, but she also has a hard time knowing if she’s really looking into her music. At the end we realized the app already counts with a solution for this issues, meaning it can be solved if the user had knowledge of the platform and its tools.

Have you ever played a new game that was just released? Well, there’s the answer to our problem. No matter what age we are we all need a tutorial when we experience something new nowadays. For this reason, we planned to implement a guide (tutorial) showing with baby steps all the different tools of the app and how to manage it, explaining every single feature of the app. Obviously, it will include a skip button for the ones that already know how to use it.

Secondly, she gets extremely frustrated when she’s hearing to her music or any music and all of a sudden it switches of genres from opera to jazz. This is why we managed to add a button option which allows the user to choose, either if it wants to keep playing songs from the same genre or if it can change freely.

Indeed the button is made based on the enable shuffle and the repeat buttons, which they both have the same characteristic of letting the action as “active” until the user presses the button again to “desactivate”. Only that in this case it is actually a switch button to make it easier to tell if it’s “on” or “off” thanks to the change of color and the movement of the button which is more familiar for everyone.