Timeline: March 2023 - June 2023
Role: Product designer
Project Type: Case study
Skills: Visual Design, Interaction Design, Early Concepting, Figma
This project represents a mockup creation of a new Spotify feature, given a pseudo-brief on a hypothetical problem that Spotify is facing.
The new Spotify feature implemented below involves a new panel in the home page that allows users to share their music and enjoy their friends' music within the app. It boosts artists' reach, encourages switching to premium, and elevates Spotify's social experience.
20% of college-age students who are on Spotify are not on the Premium plan.
Users struggle to find direct ways to share music with peers through Spotify’s available features.
I created a premium feature that boosts Spotify’s social potential while incentivizing users to purchase the premium plan. Many Spotify users already post songs on their stories -- this feature moves it into the app. This opens the opportunity to immediately listen to the song, see the playlists it’s featured on, and find more music like it.
In order to encourage users to purchase the premium plan, there is a cap on the number of stories you can view. Being able to preview this feature reveals the value of it to users who will ultimately want the ability to click through all the stories. The cap is 2 stories, which is enough to make users want to see more, but not too much to where users feel they don’t need premium. This also considers that many users don’t have dozens of Spotify followers to begin with. Additionally, users without premium cannot add to their story.
Users with the premium plan are able to scroll through all their friends’ stories, like & save their friends’ stories, and add their favorite songs to their stories.
The stories are visible on the home page both with and without premium, but non-premium users are limited to two stories and are unable to post on theirs. This home page feature incentivizes switching to premium as it remains prevalent on the screen.
This project combined my love of Spotify's design system with my experience in social platforms. Designing a new Spotify feature encouraged me to think beyond the scope of the app and brainstorm what I personally would love to see. With more time I would love to prototype these designs and build out even fuller flows that show the breadth of interaction possible with this idea.
