Spotify: Reimagining How People Manage their Tunes

Our take on improving the way you add songs to your Spotify playlists

Picture the following scenario: your favorite band releases a new album on Spotify and you really like it. But as most of the times, you fall in love with just a few songs and those songs are a great fit for your happy rock playlist🤘.

So what do you do? You tap the three dots button on each of the songs, wait for the popup menu, look for the “Add to Playlist” icon and then select the Playlist and finally the songs are added at the end of said playlist. I mean… it’s not impossible, but a little bit repetitive. That’s when we tasked ourselves to come up with a quick concept to make adding and sorting playlists on Spotify for the phone easier, and why not? Even delightful.

You have my attention. Show me what you got 👀

Ok, but first we need to state the two main goals that for us represented a successful concept:

1. Being able to select multiple songs from an album, playlist or anything that lists song inside the Spotify app.
2. Being able to add those songs to a playlist, while letting the user manipulate where those songs should land.

Now, with these in mind, we started to work on our concept, always trying to maintain the Spotify App as it was.

First, how do we handle the multiple selection?

We chose a multitouch gesture: holding tap in a song to select the first element, and with another finger tap the following songs that should be added to your selection.

A little example showing the selection of three songs

Then we had to focus on the second criteria how are these songs added to a playlist? Well, if you are a good observer you should have noticed the drop-zone that appears below. Once the person has selected the desired songs they can drop it into “Add To Playlist”. Now the person can select the Playlist the songs will be added to and has the ability to choose where in the playlist they will be added: to the start of the playlist, the end or fine tune.

“To start” and “To end” make sense, but what is “Fine tune”?

Fine tune is nothing else than letting you choose the specific place where those songs should land. It can be anywhere, in the 6th, 10th position, almost at the end, not exactly at the start…. you name it, anything can be done 🤙

The final product

We ended up really happy with the final concept and even came up with more interactions that were born while working on this concept. From sorting your existing Playlists, to dropping them on the queue… stay tuned as we’ll be posting some new ideas soon!

For now, watch the video of the concept we created in action:

So what do you think of this concept? Would it be useful for you? We would love to know your thoughts. Thanks for reading!