Connected By The Sound
Sharing the records is always be a holy thing for some users who had a passion for listening to an art-form. Exchanging the ideas that they have been just heard a good record or making any discussion of whatever the records it is. But there is the main thing that missing out from Spotify and that is gonna be a chat feature. Early Spotify had already launched this feature but they shut it down in 2017.
Challenge
I tried to understand why do users feel like this feature is missing, what could be the main pain points. So I start to research, analyze the data, and re-design with a new idea that I’ve been working with.
Goals and Motivations
- Build the user engagement to be more related to the app.
- Create new interactions so that can help user to share what is going on inside the app.
- Connecting user tasks.
App Analysis
Since I had already used the app and had some idea about it, I decided to do a Qualitative analysis. I needed to understand why this chat feature should come back to the app.
Through the analysis, I was able to identify some usability issues and pain points. I listed all of them to validate them after my User Research.
Understanding User Experience
I used 3 kinds of methods, which are Interview, Survey and Benchmarking. Since I am using Qualitative analysis, I try to find as many qualitative data as possible to strengthen the grounds necessary for the feature usage.
Digital Users Demographic
- 44% of Spotify’s monthly active users use it daily. That’s over 104 million active daily users.
- Around 29% of the number of Spotify users are aged 25 to 34, and 26% of them belong to the 18–24 age group.
- According to Verto Analytic’s data, 56% of the Spotify user base are men.
Conducting User Interview
I started my user research by conducting user interviews with 4 users, which vary from daily active users to infrequent users of any music app to understand what motivates or demotivates them from sharing the contents in the chat feature.
I conducted some telephonic interviews while some I ran in person. The interviewees’ age ranged from 23 to 30 years old, which I felt was a fair representative sample of Spotify’s current user base.
Here is the key insight from interviews:
- Most users who have used the Spotify after the end of 2017 does not know that Spotify used to have a chat feature.
- Because of that, it is hard for these users to envision how would a chat feature could contribute to their Spotify experience.
- 3 out of 4 users interviewed shows that they are intrigued with having chat feature in Spotify but does not necessarily show high enthusiasm of the feature.
- The kind of feature that the 3 users looked forward is the possibility to comment on someone’s currently playing songs and sharing music to each other.
Survey Through Reviews
I decided to screenshot the reviews from Google search and link to Spotify community centre. Since these are media that are text-based, it shows reviews that expresses emotionally, therefore I find to be enough to represent to want to bring back “Chat” feature to Spotify.
The reviews through the Spotify Community Centre shows most users — both new and old — sees that sharing links to third party apps takes too many steps. Spotify themselves has replied to these ideas, but the same suggestions kept on offered by users. This means that the enthusiasm for the feature is actually very high, thus developers might consider trying to make a more efficient server syncing system and UI designer should offer effective flow of feature usage.
Benchmark
I gathered references from JBQX app that i thought would help me envision the new feature will be put in.
Spotify as a sharing-stream service, which could be seen that they maximize the usage of group chat system. I used the JQBX app as a benchmark since I find that they are able optimize chats for music-sharing purposes.
Define
Problems
- Inaccesible for mobile, and desktop (soon).
- Many features has not been explored enough.
Jobs To Be Done
What does the customer want when they buy/download something? What is his/her true goal?
- What: I want to share a playlist/song/podcast to a friend or a group.
- How : Share directly to the app without third-party.
- Why : To feel a more fitting place to connect under the topic of it’s contents.
Ideate
After analyzing what was the needed steps to achieve the “Want” of the user, accordingly to the JTBD.
- Make mobile layout version: I tried to experiment with some ways to make a fitting layout for mobile usage, and it really was not quite easy I have to admit. But I found that putting this chat in the below navigation makes it more accessible.
- Make a LIVE collective listening feature: The closest example of this would be like a radio that offers chat feature; however, you would need and access for listening to this LIVE from an appointed admin who is in charge of monitoring the participants.
- Offer group chats: You can finally have your circle discuss a playlist together and laugh it loud in the same chat room. This would allow users to have a more intimate session to share the platform together.
- Show activity in the “Friend Activity” page, then able to refer to the listened collective listening to ask to be accepted to join by admin (edit sendiri jd lebih simple): If you want to join the LIVE session your friend is listening at the time, you can hope in by asking to be accepted by the admin by joining from the float-in page of the LIVE session.
Wireframe
Prototype
Here are the results of the designed layouts according from my research, I decided to make a lo-fi version as a scribble of the main concept, so that I can pinpoint the placement of the features. Afterwards I decided to jump to hi-fi design since I already have a clear vision of the layout.
I added more stuff on this hi-fi version since I thought it’d make the wire-framing a lot more sense.
You can access the full version of this prototype to this link below:
Iterations
After finishing the prototype, I decided to do an evaluation by involving the previous 4 interviewee and note down their opinions. But due to the time constraint, the Usability Test will be conducted after finishing necessary reviews of the current prototype.