As designers, we’re tasked with navigating a sea of ideas and priorities, and creating the vision that guides our collective work. We find ourselves balancing two, often conflicting, goals: 1. creating a playful space for experimentation and 2. fostering interdisciplinary team collaboration. So how do you make a space that fits these seemingly opposite, needs? The key to achieving both the experimentation and collaboration goals is to balance the exploratory nature of design with logical organization in your shared work. A chaotic mess of brilliant designs is incomprehensible without a helpful file structure but too much structure early on might stifle your team’s inspiration.

Everything I know about giving feedback I learned while teaching kids. I used to work part-time for a preschool program where the ethos was “don’t say ‘good job.’” It’s flimsy praise and gives kids exactly nothing to explore further. I’ve found the same to be true for adults. As a UX Writer (and a Gemini), I have a love-hate relationship with sharing my work for critique. I love discovering when the words aren’t doing what they should be — I love improving products! But, I hate that sometimes I sense my peers don’t have any particular feedback —…

Curious about working at Spotify as a UX writer (or, as some places refer to the role, content designer)? Judging by the number of DMs we receive, it sure looks like you are. And we get it. UX writing is exciting and working at a music and podcast streaming company adds some extra spice. In this post, we cover your most asked questions. Dive in! Writing the words at Spotify. Yup, that’s what we do and that’s what we get lots of questions about. And while we’re busy with, well, writing, we don’t want to keep you guessing. A couple of us UX writers have teamed up, collected your most frequently asked questions, and packaged…

When you’re working at a massive scale, like Spotify does, you accumulate huge amounts of raw data. Great product ideas can be derived from all this data, but only once it has been processed, managed, and distilled into explainable insights. To make that workflow possible and easy to execute, our data scientists need usable, well-designed tools. That’s where my team comes in. I’m a product designer in the R&D Community at Spotify, and I’ve been working in the data tools space for a few years. I was brought in to pair up with engineering squads working on platforms and experiences for data scientists.

In UX Writing, the difference between good and great work can be as simple as moving beyond last-minute games of ‘find another word for X and fill in the blanks’, to thinking about strategic and scalable language. I remember a great question posed to me by a previous editor: ‘what are you really trying to say?’ I had written multiple pages, and while the words were flowing, my thoughts were unclear. What was I trying to say?

You’ve probably heard the phrase “good design is invisible.” Well, that statement is certainly true of Spotify, where it’s the design team’s goal to create a flawless listening experience. Our designers work on a vast number of diverse and interesting problems, and unbeknownst to most, a large subset of that work is on internal tools that power Spotify under the hood. And the reason we place so much value on the teams that build these tools is because we know that creating an amazing experience for Spotifiers (as we call our employees) is necessary to create an equally amazing experience for our listeners.

For the redesign of the Fresh Finds playlist collection, Editorial Design collaborated with partner It’s Nice That. To speak to the nuances of each genre in the collection, 11 global independent visual artists were commissioned to create a set of unique artworks. Fresh Finds is a playlist collection that showcases…

Onboarding remotely? It doesn’t have to be scary. Senior UX Writer, Nicole A. Michaelis, has put together her quick tips for onboarding outside of the office, plus she’s shared her experience being hired on a team as the first UX Writer. It takes me exactly 13 minutes and 40 seconds…

The new Desktop app has rolled out, replacing one of Spotify’s oldest and most loved clients. As a Design Team, it’s often difficult (sometimes impossible) to take big risks in order to build a future you believe in. …