The Challenge

I love music and use Spotify everyday, when I’m struggling to get up in the morning, when I’m focusing at work and when I’m taking a shower in the evening. It has been a pleasant experience with Spotify but I’m quite the picky designer and I believe it could be better.

I was provided a great opportunity to do a reverse engineering practice of Spotify. I spent two weekends to take things apart, understand how it works and try to improve the user experience. This practice is purely based on my own research and my personal usage.

Part 1 : Current State Analysis

Business Goals vs. User Goals

Information Architecture

User Journeys

Part 2 : Unsolicited Redesign

Revised Information Architecture

UX Suggestions and Redesign

Part 1 : Current State Analysis

Business Goals vs. User Goals

User experience (UX) is where business goals and user goals intersect. It is how a human feels when using a product while attempting to accomplish a task or a goal.

Business Goals

Spotify is a music, podcast, and video streaming service, officially launched on 7 October 2008. Spotify is a freemium service, meaning that basic features are free with advertisements, while additional features, including improved streaming quality and offline music downloads, are offered via paid subscriptions.

Spotify free version and premium version

Freemium

Develop a wide range of innovative advertising formats — Audio Ad, Homepage Takeover, Video Takeover, Branded Playlist etc.

2. Premium

Have users invest their time to build up a library and explore functions. Offer key features in premium version.

Stream content — buying and curating more and more content. Spotify provides access to over 30 million songs in 2016. Every time that a user streams a song, Spotify gets paid.

3. More users

Retain existing users

Build a social community within the app

Encourage sharing across other social media platforms

Conduct marketing campaigns

Build partnership with third-party platforms

User Goals

A little background of myself — the user.

Age: 20–25

Device: 90% iPhone 10% Macbook

Songs of collection: >2,000 songs

Frequency of use: >5 hours everyday (premium user)

Needs: Access to all the music I like, discover new music and share music with friends.

“I just need two spots. One spot for my favourite songs and playlists; Another spot for discovering new songs. ”

User Goals

Listen to and save music

Quick and easy way to search a song

Build a personal music library and listen repeatedly

2. Discover new music

Discover Weekly/Daily Mix — listen to recommended songs

Radio — listen to songs that are similar to certain songs, albums, artists or playlists

3. Socialize with friends

Share songs or playlists

See friends activities

So, how do we maximize the sweet spot where user goals and business goals intersect?

The simple answer is providing a kick-ass user experience to make your user love using the app. Let’s start from the backbone of a digital product — Information Architecture(IA).

Information Architecture

One of the challenges people have with IA is that they can’t easily see it. Have you ever heard someone say, “Man, that website’s information architecture sucks!” I bet no. More likely you would hear, “I can’t find anything. Why is it all over the place?”

Some of my friends have the same frustrations as me since we get confused by Spotify’s navigation. So I visualized the current IA and marked the duplicated sections in green. Let’s see what is going on.