Usability and Accessibility: Spotify
Usability
Spotify was the first phone app my non-tech savvy dad was able to learn how to use. It is not the first app we’ve tried to teach him, but it is the first that he has learned very well and is able to and wants to keep using. This made me want to explore all the things that Spotify was doing right, as well as areas for improvement of course!
Learnability: It took a day, a couple of practice rounds, maneuvering with the settings, but eventually my dad got the hang of it. The nature of the app is highly visual with lots of pictures of artists and albums. Spotify also has a straightforward purpose free of distractions, as well as a predictable user flow- allowing the user to apply repetition to learn the app.
Efficiency: Similar songs to ones that the user has played will pop up, making it easy for the user to find songs they like. They can also easily access previous songs that were played. This was great for my dad because he wanted Chinese Oldies, but didn’t know the names of most of them (or I couldn’t translate it in the app) so this feature was amazing for my dad to rediscover old and new songs similar to his childhood favorites.
Memorability: With Spotify being highly visual, its graphics and images help the user see the songs as part of a physical “album” in the real world. There are also icons that are included, making the app memorable and easy to learn.
Minimizing errors: Spotify has taken the precaution to minimize errors of accidental duplicate songs by having a pop-up confirm the action when a song is added twice to a playlist. In addition, playing an “outlier” song will not greatly affect its suggested songs to the user, as Spotify looks for patterns in music taste.
Satisfaction: As a user of Spotify, I am highly satisfied as Spotify not only serves the purpose of listening to music I love, it also delights in helping users discover new music and artists.
Accessibility
When it comes to accessibility, I found that the Spotify app is mostly accessible to users. Line height and spacing are both great, making songs highly readable. The contrast between the background, buttons, and text is also great. There is good visual hierarchy, as well as modularity, with its displayed albums following a certain grid spacing. There are also songs in many different languages, making Spotify accessible to users who speak and read different languages.
Something I noticed was that Spotify is always in dark-mode, not providing the user an option to change the background color. This is sort of a special circumstance since the colors of Spotify are represented in the app itself. However, for the visually-impaired, some may prefer to read with black text on white background. I personally have not found issue with this, and find the dark background to be not too dark(providing too high of a contrast) and good for reading.
One other small detail (literally) is that the button to scroll quickly through one’s playlist is very thin and close to the edge of the screen, almost unseen unless one searches for it. This could be an area of improvement to increase accessibility of the scroll bar.
