Spotify: App Critique

Spotify, the coveted music playing company, has been getting a lot of buzz in the last year by going public in an unconventional way. It has gathered many loyal fans (207M as of the end of 2018) and they’ve made Spotify as part of their daily routine during their work, workouts, parties, and even sleep time. Their value proposition is to give users access to millions of songs, and their mission statement is to

“To unlock the potential of human creativity — by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it.”

Based on my journey with Spotify as a user, the company is very experimental and aren’t afraid to fail. They constantly experiment what it means to design simply with complexity, embodied by one of their design principles — lagom or “just the right amount” in Swedish. This principle has allowed them to continue testing what is too much and too little for the users to have a fantastic experience listening to music. I am a premium users, so I recognize that there is bias to begin with.

Target Audience

Spotify’s primary user is premium users who need music to be part of their daily routine. This group of people is constantly looking out for new songs, artists, and playlists that fit their context.

The secondary users are casual listeners who listen without a subscription who don’t mind ads or shuffle play. (Spotify has a separate app for artists and I will not focus on that…