Designing Spotify Jamroom: a case for the shared music experience on Spotify
This is the product of my personal end of year design challenge. I decided I didn’t want to do yet another redesign. I’d rather take what existed and extend it further. This would need me to be mindful of cannibalizing other parts of the product and making sure that whatever I designed felt integrated.
Disclaimer: I don’t work for Spotify. It would be very cool too though 😉
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed making it 😊
Goals 🚀
Skill Development
- Strengthen my visual design, interaction design, and prototyping skills.
- Develop my product thinking skills.
- Develop my user research skills.
New Feature Implementation
- Ideate, research, and design a new Spotify feature that solves a problem for its users.
Tools: Airtable, Google Sheets, Coffee, Good Ol’ Pen and Paper, Sketch, Invision
What’s Spotify Jamroom? 🤔
Imagine you’re going out on a Friday night with your friends, you’re all getting ready and excited for a night on the town. One of your friends tells you to put on your “Friday Night Fun” playlist. You grab your phone and start scrolling through your playlists. Its sorted by recently played, you haven’t listened to it since last week. You know it was shared with you but you can’t find it because it’s not in your recently played playlists(and thus further up the list). You’re frustrated. You don’t listen to it to often, but it’s their playlist, made exactly for this moment…😞
Or here’s another scenario, you’re having an awesome party, you’d like your party guests involved in the music creation. You pass around an aux cord or some of them try to connect to the Bluetooth speaker. Even worse…you pass out your phone😨.
Being the student of design I was, I could feel the disjointedness. This could be better.
Spotify Jamroom is my solution to this. It imagines a world where all the playlists and songs shared with a select group of friends(or a large group of people really) live in one, easily accessible place. More specifically,
- Your favorite playlists can be imported to or created within the jamroom and are instantly available to the members.
- Playlists can be made optionally collaborative, to all or select members of the room.
- Temporary jamrooms can be created for occasions and made public. I’ve found this is particularly useful for Spotify’s college demographic who want to engage party attendees through Spotify.
Overall, the aim of this feature is to bring the jam sessions and the shared music experience friends have in dorm rooms, living rooms, parties and a multitude of group chats into the app they love.
Design Process 🛠
Background
Let’s punch out for a second, Spotify is a popular streaming music app with both free and Premium paid plan options. Users can stream unlimited music, create and curate playlists, and discover new music all through the mobile and desktop apps.
I’ve categorized the Spotify experience into two:
- Curation Driven Experiences (searching for music, creating playlists etc.)
- Algorithm Driven Experiences (Discover Weekly, Release Radar etc)
One can see that these experiences are deeply personal, existing between Spotify and the user. However, I believe that the music experience of a number of Spotify users while personal, is also deeply shared and that these shared experiences are powerful.
We know that words have taken new meaning in the digital age. Some of such words I believe now have new meaning is Social and Shared. To me, Social is the unending stream of the internet conscious (Twitter Feeds, Facebook Feeds etc) and the tools that enable us to feed this stream. Shared, on the other hand, are the smaller, tight-knit groups individuals have in offline or digital forms.
The Spotify app as it is today feels like sharing music is a peripheral task. Social isn’t available as a top level interface interaction. The shared music experience I advocate for, currently being solved with collaborative playlists, feels like an afterthought.
I definitely don’t know (or claim to know) all the various factors that push and pull on the Spotify product and design teams on a daily basis. What I do know is, it has left me wanting more than an app that predicts my taste but also empowers me to seamlessly share it with those that matter in a way that feels integrated and natural.
Digging around the Spotify community platform I found that in the Social category, the second and third highest voted posts are both around this idea of a shared music experience deeply rooted in mirroring offline experience. I also had the wonderful pleasure of chatting with the author of the second highest one.
In all this, one thread weaved itself strong throughout the stories of multiple different people. This is,
There are offline moments where people and the music shared come together to create a deeply connected, shared music experience that Spotify is a part of.
I knew I needed to pull further in this thread.
The User Research and Data
I must admit that going into user research with an idea of what one wants to build invariably alters how the research is conducted. With that in mind, my research was exploratory in nature, seeking to validate the jamroom concept and answer the following questions,
- Which of the Spotify users would use Jamroom?
- What is their biggest pain?
- What are they trying to achieve?
- How are they currently doing it?
- Are they aware of current solutions? Why or why not?
- How do they fit into key business metrics? (Likelihood to convert to premium and convert others as well)
My research was conducted primarily using a survey powered by Airtable and user interviews (via phone calls). I used this survey as a way to informally reach a broad spectrum of Spotify users. Business professionals using Spotify for work to college students using it to power their late night events and cram sessions.
From this, I looked for trends in responses and who they were coming from. As a starting point, The goal was to understand 3 self-identified stories around playlist creation. These stories went on to be classified:
- The Making Story: Are playlists made on Spotify? How are they made? Who are they? Why are they making them?
- The Listening Story: Do you listen to playlists on Spotify? How do you consume music on Spotify?
- The Sharing Story: Do you share music? Is music shared with you on Spotify? Who do you share with? Who shares with you? Why does it happen?
In total, I collected over 40+ responses and individually spoke to 15+ users from the survey and from my school campus and friends.
Insights from research
From my research, I identified and answered the questions posed earlier. Through this, I generated user personas for Jamroom as a subset of Spotify’s existing users.
I identified that:
- The ideal user of Jamroom are people that already share music offline. These are primarily college students who make up 60–70% of the Spotify user base.
- Their biggest pain is sharing music with those that matter to them(close friends, significant others etc) as instantaneously as they would like in a seamless way.
- They want to be able to share music instantly with those that matter, whoever they may be.
- Most are sharing music outside of the platform in group chats in iMessage and Facebook Messenger. In the case of a large group, either the aux cord is passed around, or multiple people connect to a Bluetooth speaker. In some cases, users reported, “we just yell at whoever is playing the music”
- 35% of respondents reported being aware of collaborative playlists. Of that percentage, all reported it was cumbersome to work with, citing it didn’t work very well in party scenarios or that they often forgot how to get it to work.
- All of the users I directly spoke to reported they would upgrade to premium for Jamroom, it would improve the premium offering and would attempt to convert others to premium for Jamroom.
Click here to see some of the early data collected
Sketches and Wireframes
A big part of prototyping and subsequently designing for this project was understanding the current design patterns present in the Spotify app. I didn’t reinvent the wheel(at least not too much), rather chose to follow established decisions, taking liberties where no clear path was obvious.
In its simplest form, users can,
- Select “Your Jamrooms” from the Home tab.
- Selecting this takes them to a list view of jamrooms. For the sake of demonstration, I designed with a jamroom already created and the ability to create a new one.
- Using the “plus” icon in the top left corner of the screen, users can create a new Jamroom.
- Once a jamroom has been created, the user can enter the jamroom. From this point, the user can add a playlist/song to the jamroom as well as search for a user to add to the jamroom. From here, the song has been shared.
Click below for a live prototype.
Future Considerations⚡️
In the future, the scope of a jamroom scales perfectly with scenarios where individuals with loose online or in-person connections gather. A great example of this is large parties. For the sake of simplicity, this isn’t demonstrated in my prototype.
Spotify codes integrate very well with Jamrooms. Ideally, they would be shared with party invites and work as a great way to build buzz. Snapchat has already established this usage pattern with scanning snap codes to add new friends.
A Quick Reflection 💭
I. Love. Spotify 💚
I believe Spotify’s superpower has always been its ability to enable its users to have these “WOW” experiences that they inevitably tie back to the app itself- think Spotify Connect.
Starting this project, I knew this would be a fantastic opportunity for me to hone my design skills. I had worked on design in side projects but never to the extent I had to for this
I can confidently say I learnt the things I set out to learn. I’ve learned what works, and what doesn’t. I’ve learned how to talk to users, perform early research and translate that to a design.
Resources
These are some resources that helped me in the process.
- https://medium.freecodecamp.org/i-wanted-to-see-how-far-i-could-push-myself-creatively-so-i-redesigned-instagram-1ff99f28fa8b
- https://uxdesign.cc/project-design-5-spotify-9372e519d0b
- https://medium.com/@andrealimjoco/redesigning-the-spotify-icon-suite-63f16853ba00
- https://blog.prototypr.io/spotify-reverse-engineering-8f6a0d9850c8
- https://medium.com/@hellostanley/design-doesnt-scale-4d81e12cbc3e
- https://uxplanet.org/redesigning-playlist-creation-on-spotify-7161a83332b8
