Spotify UX redesign — UI/UX case study

Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming and media services provider, founded in 2006 by Daniel EK. It is one of the most popular music streaming services right now.

I’m an avid user of Spotify and I absolutely love it. I use it while working, chilling, during commute and even while gaming. User experience of Spotify is actually amazing! But, I’ve always felt that certain user flows on the Spotify iOS app could be made better. And that’s how this project was born.

Problem:

1. Adding a song to a playlist is confusing and tedious
2. A lot of people listen to music from “liked songs” frequently, but doing so require 3 taps.
3. It is not possible to add multiple songs to a playlist at once.
4. Not able to pin a playlist for quick access.

Goal:

1. Make it easier and straightforward to add a song to a playlist

2. Make it easier to play songs from ‘Liked Songs’

3. Pin playlists to easily access it

4. Make it possible to add multiple songs to a playlist.

Project duration: 20 days

Research

To get to know more about the users, I went out and conducted user research. My primary method of research was user interviews and surveys.

The people for the survey were mainly my friends and people from various Discord servers. I created a Google Form and shared it to them.

Here’s an image of the survey results:

I wasn’t able to get anyone to do a video interview, so I decided to interview them over texting. During the user interviews, I asked the users about these problems and it was evident that they all faced these problems and needed a solution.

From the survey, the problems with the current Spotify app was:

-It is confusing and tedious to add a new song to a playlist

-Playing songs from ‘Liked songs’ wasn’t straightforward.

Solution

I started off by sketching my ideas on a paper. I wasn’t able to do Lo-fi prototyping, so I skipped that part. After sketching I jumped to drawing wireframes of the UI, and here’s an image of it:

I didn’t do any UI overhaul of Spotify because the current UI was pretty good (I didn’t want to change what was good already).

Adding a song to playlist on the original Spotify app:

On the new design:

Playing from Liked Songs on the original design:

On the new design:

Solution for other problems:

Testing

I tested the product among my friends and also with people from various Discord servers. Overall, everyone found this design very usable.

But there were some parts where they had confusion/problem. So I iterated the design and came up with a slightly different solution.

Video of the final product:

Result

Now the users are able to easily add a song to a playlist, pin a playlist, easily play their Liked Songs, which overall enables the user to have a better user experience.

Thank you for reading