Spotify studios
I designed Spotify Studios, an improvement of Spotify’s group listening feature, in order to increase social involvement within the app. This feature promotes engagement with others through live queue interactions and improves the discoverability of other users on the Studio page, facilitating a more social music-listening experience.
User problem
Users struggle to find direct ways to share music with peers through Spotify’s available features. Because we don’t directly offer anything for social activity on the platform, users have to work around the app / find unofficial ways of using it to achieve this purpose.
Business problem
Spotify is generally popular with students, but we are not fully realizing the potential to monetize them. 20% of college-age students who are on Spotify are not on the Premium plan.
Goal
Create a social feature that increases the percentage of college-aged users on Student Premium while also maintaining or increasing the number of songs played.
Roles
UI Designer
UX Designer
Timeline
May 2022
Tools
Figma
Spotify
Team
Seth Nguyen
App research
Current group listening
Spotify’s current group listening feature has a limited reach, low discoverability, and an inefficient task completion time, which all contribute to high user effort and low user satisfaction. The only way to access one of these rooms is through invitation, leaving all responsibility and planning to the creator of a session.
How to add friends
Spotify mobile provides no way for users to see others’ activity on the app or to discover new users unless you are intentionally adding them through the search feature.
Creating collaborative playlists
Spotify also has a collaborative playlist feature that allows users to add songs to a shared playlist, but this still doesn’t foster a synchronous, engaging experience for users.
Among some of the top music streaming services globally, there is a lack of live social activity between users within their apps. With such a highly-social user demographic, Spotify has the foundation and audience to engage with more users by improving the social features that already exist.
How might we design an experience that leverages college students’ highly social lifestyles to increase the number of premium users on Spotify?
How might we improve the existing sessions feature by shortening the task completion time but increasing the discoverability of rooms to other users?
How might we facilitate an experience that fosters curiosity about and engagement with other users on the app?
User research
So… how might we?
Brainstorming and prototyping
After generating around 10 ideas, I narrowed it down to three: in-app messaging, live streams with musicians, and group listening studios.
I decided to move forward with improving the group listening feature because I believe there is a unique experience with unrealized potential that Spotify - especially with its young and social users - can take advantage of. The other features can be easily replicated through other apps or services.
User flow
New premium features
In order to incentivize users to upgrade to Premium accounts, all users, regardless of their account status, will be able to see and join studios; however, non-premium users will not have access to any of the following features:
Create
Users are able to create and open private, public, or friends-only studios, which will then appear on other users’ studio pages.
Feed
This feature allows greater discovery of adjacently-connected friend rooms and provides a space for users to directly communicate with their friends and followers without using third-party apps.
In-app invitation
Friends can be invited directly to studios through the Spotify app, shortening the time and minimizing the effort it takes for users to initiate group listening.
Voting
Users can now upvote or downvote songs in studios to change the order of songs in the queue. The queue organizes the songs from greatest to least upvotes.
Playlists
This feature allows users to quickly and easily create a playlist of all of the songs in the studio and sort them categorically.
Results
A few key metrics that I would measure to gauge the success of this feature would be the number of premium accounts, the number of songs played, the number of friends users have, and the amount of time premium users spent on the app compared to freemium users.