Voices of UX
It takes a village
Solo UX work is a shot in the dark
A week ago, I realized that I had a blog deadline coming up. I knew that I wanted to write something from a more general UX perspective — something that challenged me to think about UX from a different angle. So I got to brainstorming. Maybe I could complete a UX case study of a UI that annoys me? That sounds fun and different. But what UI? Well, I use Spotify every day and there are definitely things I’d change…so let me just quickly redesign its UI all by myself and share my success story on Medium. Sounds simple enough.
Yeah, that’s a really bold goal. In hindsight, of course I recognize that as well. But in the moment, I was fueled by (maybe too much) coffee and an urge to perfect an app that I wanted to be better.
So, unsurprisingly, I did not do a great job redesigning a complex UI in a week. But, lucky for me, I still got a blog out of it. Maybe I don’t get to talk about the detailed ways that I successfully redesigned Spotify, but I do get to share some important realizations that I had about UX work.
The lessons I learned support a well-known pillar of UX, but one that always bears repeating: UX work takes a village. Or at least a team.
You still learn valuable lessons from failure
Maybe I’m just another change-resistant user, but I was very grumbly when Spotify updated its desktop UI a couple of months ago. More specifically, they changed the “your library” section and added a “now playing” view on the right-hand side.
And, yes, there were things I wanted Spotify to change — but not those things.
In theory, these changes should have improved my experience. But maybe it was too big of a change at once, maybe it took away features that I relied on, or maybe it didn’t add anything I needed.
I often find myself frustrated with the new library organization. I don’t like how playlists, podcasts, albums, and artists were all mixed into a big list. Filters allow you to view each media type at a time, but I’m still annoyed that you can’t organize things in the “all library items” view.
Or, maybe you can, but it’s just not an intuitive process for me.
And, while the “now playing” view sounds great and makes sense as an addition, I just find it annoying me all the time. It seems to pop up by default when you start a listening session. And if you close out of it, it just reopens when you switch to a new song, playlist, artist, etc. For whatever reason, I just don’t care about the information in this window. Theoretically, it seems like information that (as a self-proclaimed music aficionado) would love to see. But, something about it just doesn’t feel useful to me in its current form. Plus, I know that Spotify isn’t intended to be a social media app, but I love to see what my friends are listening to. You can still see that info, but the now playing view often takes over and closes the friends view.
All this to say, I have just found the new desktop UI to be clunky and bothersome. I think it has some great ideas, but I think the implementation could use some refining.
Cue me, coming in to save the day with my solo UI overhaul.
And, after hours of getting irritated with Sketch and my own design limitations, this is as far as I got:
Maybe you can see the exact moment that I gave up.
I suppose it’s not awful, but also… it’s not good. And it’s clearly nowhere near complete.
I was making adjustments to the features that bothered me, but I was pretty much running in the dark with my direction. Besides my own opinions, I had nothing to go off of. I didn’t know which areas needed to be completely changed, which areas just needed tweaking, or which areas were best left as is. After restarting my design direction for the third time, I decided that I needed to call it quits. I wasn’t going to build the Spotify pyramids on my own.
But (silver lining) failure is often the best way to learn. And so, my frenzied caffeine-fueled redesign project still reinforced some well-known lessons, which I clearly needed reminding of.
User research and understanding is non-negotiable for impactful design work
Like I said, I was running solely off my own perspective for this project. Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t good enough. I thought that I already fully recognized the value of developing an understanding of your users and their needs. It’s something I talk about all the time. But I think it took this failure for me to truly start to integrate this belief into my professional tool belt. If I had been able to utilize the opinions of multiple types of users, I would have had more inspiration, focus, and confidence in truly improving the Spotify UI. I only knew how I felt about the UI, which is UX-red-flag #1. With just my opinions at play, I struggled to figure out the best way to solve my annoyances.
This is a lesson that I’m sure I’ll continually learn and be reminded of as a UXer. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “my experience is everyone else’s experience”, even when you know that’s not true. But, maybe sharing my failure will prevent you from also having to relearn this the hard way.
Design is not a one-person job
I was swimming in the deep end trying to redesign a complex UI all by myself. And, while I can applaud myself for trying, it’s an issue that would never happen if I were designing as part of a team. The checks and balances that a design team affords both diversifies and enhances your design. It also saves time and effort from being wasted. My team would’ve prevented me from falling into the trap of designing for myself. Also, I’m a content designer, so I have about 0 years of professional experience in interaction design. While it’s great to have beginners on your team, maybe it’s not great to have the only designer be a newbie. It’d be nice to have a village for UX work, but it’s impossible without a team.
Plus, I would have had a more concrete plan than “let me fix this silliness”.
No design will be perfect
Obviously my design was incomplete and far from perfect. But part of my issue was that I felt the need to design the perfect design in order for it to be worth sharing. The reality is: perfect designs don’t exist. You can create a truly great and effective design, but calling it perfect kind of goes against the goals of UX. You’ll never be able to design for the needs of every single user. People are diverse and unique, and their needs aren’t even going to always stay the same. Striving for perfection only leads to complacency and a false sense of completeness. Design is always evolving and can always be improved.
Your design doesn’t need to be perfect — it just needs to be an improvement.
So my case study was pretty much dead on arrival once I decided to do it on my own. It was good to stretch my creative muscles, even if it didn’t ultimately work out. I called this project a failure, but that’s not really true. It was an opportunity to reconnect with some of the cornerstones of UX — one that I’m more than happy to share with others.
Have a story of your own? Write with us! Our community thrives on diverse voices — let’s hear yours.
