I spent three months working on a personal project: a mobile app redesign for ♫ Spotify
Below you’ll find a case study offering potential solutions for how Spotify could reorganize misplaced elements, retune half-baked features, and improve their visual consistency. I based my work off of qualitative data, user interviews, and Spotify’s public design research articles.
Disciplines
Team
Timeline
Tools
Adobe Creative Suite
Read more below, or skip to the end for videos of the final prototypes.
Silicon Valley's "Cinderella story."
Spotify is a Silicon Valley “Cinderella story.” A startup that managed to grow into a massive corporation, despite competition from trillion-dollar companies.
In many ways, Spotify owed its unique success to its fantastic product design. To an interface that was sleek, focused, innovative, elegant. One that deeply understood its users.
Spotify's mobile interface in 2018: clean and streamlined!
However...
With dozens of new features being added every year, Spotify’s interface has slowly become increasingly confusing, frustrating, and inefficient.
Spotify's mobile interface in 2024.
Recently, Spotify has been stumbling below its typical design elegance. Before we dive into specifics, let’s acknowledge some of these high-level problems.
A couple of Spotify's recently added interactions are relatively half-baked. No matter how useful or interesting these features could be, the design is holding it back. A few small improvements to these would go a long way.
Spotify’s 3-page menu of Home, Search, and Your Library worked extremely well five years ago, back when Spotify was a simpler app. However, Spotify has recently added many new elements: podcasts, audiobooks, Blend/music sharing options, TikTok-style autoplaying preview channels, merchandise, events, etc. The old architecture cannot keep up with all of these new additions.
For one, there’s a lack of parity between the features that the desktop version of Spotify offers and the mobile app version. And beyond that, there’s a general lack of visual consistency within the mobile app that seems careless and unnecessary and could be easily smoothed out.
Obviously, lots of people. It would be remiss to generalize Spotify’s 636 million active users into a singular user persona. Instead, it’s easier to imagine all listeners being placed on the following graph:
Adapted from Jason Yuan’s case study: “I Got Rejected By Apple Music... So I Redesigned It”
"I like their playlists a lot. And it's free."
"Their Daily Mix algorithm is so good!"
“Why do I use Spotify? To listen to music!”
Considering Spotify’s goals, and young user base (50% are millennials or younger), it’s safe to say that Spotify appeals the most to nomads: people who care about audio discovery and personalized content. And while Spotify has been trying for a while to get users into its podcast and audiobook selection, the app remains primarily a place for music listeners. In other words, Spotify most appeals most to the top right quadrant. For Spotify to expand it's listener base, they need to continue to try to appeal to users in other quadrants of the graph.
We're going to analyze Spotify piece by piece, fixing organization and improving intuitiveness. But here are our big picture goals that will dictate how we try to make those positive changes.
a) Design new ways to stream/discover audio to entice hoarders to use Spotify.
b) Find subtle ways to emphasize Spotify's new podcast and audiobook content.
c) Rearrange/retool features from Spotify's current app instead of adding features that may not be easy to develop.
I rearranged the Spotify architecture, polished features like the AI DJ and the preview boxes, and added tightened up visual inconsistencies within the interface to create a more unified, holistic, and intuitive Spotify experience.
While shortform content/previews has been on Spotify for some time, it's always felt out out of place. Inspired in part by @Juxtopposed, I created a new page to house this content. Introducing Discover: a dedicated home for users to discover new music, podcasts, and audiobooks faster than ever before.
Spotify has always had success when promoting its social features, like Wrapped or Blend. Let's take some of the more niche social aspects of Spotify and make them more accessible. With a new Following page, users can easily keep up with their top artists and their favorite friends.
Spotify’s AI DJ made some waves upon its release, but many users are frustrated by the lack of choice they have in music the DJ plays. It seems like a no-brainer to upgrade the feature to receive more user input.
Spotify’s sidebar used to contain options that seemed very niche and unhelpful for such an accessible menu. Let’s add some features that would be much more useful to have easily accessible.
Spotify's preview boxes and Add to Library button are unintuitive and highly controversial amongst users. I made a couple of tweaks here and there to improve visual language and simplify the user experience.
And finally, a couple of minor improvements to clarify the visual hierarchy of the homepage. First impressions are always important, right?
I’ve always admired Spotify’s design, and I learned a lot diving deep into their app design and trying to improve it on my own. I hope that you gained something useful from reading this, and that you came up with some ideas of your own!
Next steps:
- Explore alternate solutions to Spotify’s problems could help create an even more efficient interface.
- Conducting additional user interviews and testing to identify additional pain points in the interface.
I always try to find personal elements in all of the projects I work on, but as a music-lover myself, this project was something that mattered very deeply to me. I always strive to design things that center themselves around humanity: to make things with empathy, personality, and love.