Deep-dive into Spotify’s User Onboarding Experience
#Ideal onboarding is no onboarding.
Spotify has been around since 2008, and now boasts a whopping 270M+ Monthly Active Users. A significant proportion (45.7%, to be precise) of this set are paid subscribers of this global audio streaming subscription service.
Nonetheless, I was (quite) late to the party; and actively started streaming podcasts on Spotify only during the ending months of 2019 — during my long drives between home and work.
Just as you can expect from any genuine product guy, I am curious to understand (and copy if it’s worth!) the user onboarding process of mobile apps, web applications, and other tech products, as well as the elements that go behind creating the right messaging, especially for fresh customers. This time, I decided to get into the shoes of a Product Manager at Spotify (would love to be in those shoes for a few years; Spotify recruiters please note) and documented my insights on Spotify’s User Onboarding Experience. Read on:
Spotify — Product Onboarding. What’s covered:
- Cue for prospective and new users to get on-board Spotify
- Current on-boarding journey — Hits & Misses
- The Company’s key goals for new users & (reverse estimated) success metrics
- [Bonus] 5 recommendations to improve Spotify’s on-boarding
What cues for prospective and new users to begin using Spotify?
Q. Why does a new user decide to download the Spotify app? What initial expectations would a typical user have?
A. This is directly influenced from the product positioning on the App store/Play store:
“Listen to your favourite music & podcasts. Listen to millions of your favourite songs!
Play music for free.
Music in your language.
New music you’ll love.”
New user expectation → play music of your own choice without constraints along with new artist/track discovery for free.
The onboarding process has already begun, with the user navigating Spotify’s page on the Play/App Store, in case you didn’t realize.
Current Onboarding Journey — Hits, and Misses
Screen 1 || Landing screen + Login/Signup
- [Hit] Reiterates value proposition loud & clear on what to expect: “millions of songs. Free on Spotify”.
- [Hit] Strong call-to-actions (a. Login, and b. Signup) . Conventional options: Phone, Facebook (currently lacking personalization based on Fb profile?) & email
Timestamp T = 30s
Screen 2 || Create an account
- [Miss] Asks for DoB & Gender. Induces minor privacy concerns. I would like to see a single-line justification immediately below these on how this data will be used to improve the in-app experience: ex. track/artist recommendations etc.
Even a 2% increase in user confidence at this initial stage is valuable.
- [Hit] A Tick comes up live as soon as the first set of information is entered. Done, save & other buttons are responsive; acknowledging a touch from the user. Input responsiveness is solid.
Timestamp T = 60s
Screen 3 || Account ready
- [Miss ]“What’s your name? This appears on your spotify profile” — should be integrated with DoB + Gender screen (screen 2); a user will be itching to play music or stream audio at this moment!
Why increase the timestamp unnecessarily?
Timestamp T = 75s
Screen 4 || What music do you like?
- [Hit] Design: Tablet-styled buttons generate satisfaction. Looking forward to tap. Also:
- [Miss] The design induces a slight fear that selecting one language option can push me to the next screen. Need an organic (by design?) cue to be confident about selecting multiple music choices.
- [Miss] Limited (10) initial language selections only. Should club RoW (Rest of the World) languages into an expandable ‘others’ sub-section, to maintain flexibility. What if I am interested in Spanish music? Nothing seems to be gained by this limitation in the first place.
Timestamp T = 100s
Screen 5 || Choose 3 or more artists if you like
- [Superhit] Dynamic artist recommendations are a superhit. Highly distinctive onboarding practice; unique to Spotify. These polite nudges (recommendations) are accurate as well.
- [Hit] Semi-endless supply of artists engages a broad range of audience, both -
- User type A: looking to play tracks quickly, and improvise on the go, and
- User type B: patient & passionate for music artists/genres — would typically spend additional time to setup the perfect feed.
- [Hit] Displaying artists’ pictures adds extensive stickiness value — since the user feels much more connected to the content than otherwise, and at this moment would have a minimal intent of exiting the app.
This phase is flexible enough to keep me engaged as per my own choices, or move on.
Timestamp T = 3–7m
This is now the ideal time to let the user dive deep. Let them use the app organically for the single most important function — to play music. User’s urge to listen to their favourite track has peaked.
Screen 6 || Try Premium (part 1)
- [Big Miss]The nudge to try premium is completely unexpected. This is not what I as a first time user was expecting, and definitely not this early into their journey. I haven’t even listened to a track yet + its coming-in like an advertisement.
Can this nudge not be held at least until the user performs some actions of interest? Like playing 15 minutes of audio?
- [Miss] “Oh, and I can’t play offline for free? Didn’t know. Spotify wasn’t crystal clear in their messaging”
- [Miss] From a purely user experience point of view, the initial poke to opt-in for premium:
- Adds to the TAT of playing first track
- Forces user towards a binary decision early-on in the journey
Timestamp T = +15s
Beyond Screen 6 || The long on-boarding tail — Playing music & podcasts
- [Hit] Daily mixes: First aha moment for the user (play first track) is achieved at a single tap.
First track played at T = 3.5m (least)
- [Hit] Searching for content is not mandatory. Searching is well-categorized.
- [Hit] Spotify seems to follow cyclic onboarding: multiple cycles of music/artist selection & customization; this is basically the core part of the onboarding process.
- [Miss] Search tab — when a category is selected when searching for music, the search option completely disappears. A user will NOT be able to search for music when a category has been selected.
On-boarding Tail || Premium prompts
- Prompts to opt for premium after the full value of Spotify has been demonstrated to new users is OK (except Screen 6 || Premium (Part 1) above).
- [Hit] The value proposition messaging/communication during up-sell for Premium is crystal clear, however.
Success metrics for the App & Key Goals for the Spotify Product Team.
Q. What core elements guide the key on-boarding goals?
A. The list goes something like this:
- Onboarding TAT (turnaround time)
- Account setup TAT
- Plays first track (y/n and time)
- Plays first track to 80% of track length (y/n and time)
- Plays first 5 tracks (y/n and time)
- Relevance of content & feed (combination of user choices + automatic recommendations).
Accuracy of automated recommendations can be measured by assigning ranks in ascending order to artists/tracks and logging scores based on user selection.
Extent & ease of manual personalization will contribute equally to the resulting score.
7. Premium membership conversions:
Premium membership conversions are an obvious success metric for Spotify, since the app pokes a new user to opt for premium as soon as the music choices are mapped + we observe several prompts during audio streams.
[Bonus] 5 Recommendations to improve the present on-boarding experience
- Lessons from TikTok: Get users to play music initially without the need to signup or login at all. Rather, define a usage score (based on number of tracks played/time spent on app etc) or feature action points (liking tracks/saving artists/creating playlists etc) to induce a poke to signup/login before using the app further.
This will make the initial phase of on-boarding completely friction-free.
The initial user funnel will improve.
Retention will increase; since we are exposing the value proposition of the app to a greater number of initial users.
2. Multichannel onboarding: This is the present email that I got when I signed-up to Spotify via email:
As a new user, I don’t see any direct value in this email. Apart from the confirm your account call-to-action,
Subject line should induce some excitement.
Need raw creativity with the email content. Maybe route the user to Spotify blog? Play a music trailer?
3. Merge screens 4 (“What’s your name”) & 5 (“DoB & Age”) to optimize setup time and reduce overall onboarding TAT by 5–7%.
4. [engagement idea] As soon as the first choice of artist is made by the user (screen 5), a track from the selected artist could begin in the background (with option to manually pause/stop). This will:
Softly begin to satisfy the user’s urge to listen to music early-on in this initial process, and -
Improve conversion rate for premium subscriptions (Ideally true since a user listening to their favourite artist will be more likely to spend; this will need to be tested/measured with practical data, however)
5. Premium Membership: Premium conversions might improve if this poke comes after an appropriate “Schelling Point”.
P.S. If you’re itching to google what a “Schelling Point” is, I’ll save you the effort —
In the most simplest of definitions, a Schelling Point is the instance where a user has navigated the app’s net value and thus is most likely to spend money in order to access further value.
Of course, making the most out of the Schelling Point concept requires that the user (and a potential paid subscriber in this) has to be offered a teaser/demo/sneak-peek into that specific further value of the Product. Here is one of Spotify’s ways to extend this intrinsic communication to the user:
Before I close, I feel an urge to quickly state why I am so intrigued about understanding a Product’s User On-boarding Process in the first place. And to do that, I would like borrow this modified version of the Gartner Hype Cycle from Daniel Elizalde’s blog, which does an incredible job of highlighting the importance of a carefully-crafted User On-boarding Experience:
Signing off,
Smarth
Find me on LinkedIn here.
