UX Project - Spotify Redesign

Personal Portfolio Project

The Problem

I started this project from a personal user experience as I was often finding issues with the spotify desktop app on a day to day basis. I found that a lot of the presentation was not relevant to me and was a lot of bloat to get to any of the music or podcasts that I liked. This caused quite a bit of frustration as trying to find anything relevant became a pain point and as a result would often got me using Spotify less and less, to the point where any changes to playlists I wanted to make I wouldn’t do or any new music that was released I would miss out on.

This led me to look deeper into the spotify desktop app and create an assessment of all the issues I was having on a day to day basis. From this I found there was quite a lot that I felt ruined the experience.

These are the main findings I came across from my personal experience:

Unnecessary bloat, I.E Spotify generated mixes and radios rather than user prefered content.
No easy identification of new releases from followed artists.
No easy access to artists your following from the home page.
Home screen is not useful to the user.
Pushy experience of showing artists you’re not interested in.
Artist’s pages are not utilized properly.
General UI is very cluttered and will sometimes have double ups of content.

To give further explanation to these findings I will go through in more detail a few different images of the spotify app and explain the issues.

Let’s begin by taking a look at the first image.

Based on my experience, the home screen when you first open the app has a lot going on in the screen and could be cut down. As there is a lot of the user to focus on and get distracted by rather than focus on the content thet want to. This creates a massive pain point as what is on the home page should be more tailored to the user rather than already being pushed content that is not relevant to the user.

To get even further into specific issues, you can already see that just on the home page that there is a repeated section with the recently played section both at the top of the page and the titled last played at the bottom of the first image. This shows wasted space that could be more tailored to the user but is instead just there to distract the user to go further into the app to find any content that they want that isn’t readily avalible in the small window of the library.

In addtion, the second carousel with the sounds to revisit and made for do not offer the user with any useful suggestions. As a person wanting the use the app I would prefer to see more relevant things to the user or to have recommendations on a separate page as it shouldn’t be more clicks to see the users followed content. This already shows that in this current setting the app does not value the user as it very easily pushes content that the user did not initially follow.

So as a result this has already made wasted effort in space and as an expereince makes it harder for the user to find thier content when that should be the first thing that they see.

While they have made some positive UX desicions with the small amount of filtering, there is still a lot more that could be done to improve the expereince. But over all the whole expereince in the app has a lot of pain points that do not benifit the user.

Research

To start my research, I searched for some alternative answers to the question “What do you not like about the Spotify app”. This was a combination of desk research and talking to people to find any other points in the app that were either aligned with my personal frustrations or any new points. This became very apparent that I was not the only one who found issues with the current Spotify UX and UI.

I have listed below the main points that I found through this portion of my research, to what I thought would be useful to look at and further develop solutions.

With this all in place, I have what I need to start creating new wireframe designs to the concept I am working towards.

To acquire even further insight into desktop apps to get a more rounded perspective, I took a dive into both the Steam app and the Netflix website as it functions similar to the app. Noting down what were some positives and negatives of their current designs as they have more positive perceptions from users, such as clear identification and clear categories. Which gave me another base to look for improvements to bring into the new design.

Based on this research I have collected, I have made a design brief to follow when I make the new design concept for the app. I have broken it down to these main steps.

1. Create a clean, stable, predictable Library structure (e.g., Music / Podcasts / Audiobooks) to simplify the structure.  
2. Reduce navigation depth so users can reach saved playlists in 1 click.  
3. Add a “Not Interested” or “Hide this content type” button on cards.  
4. Allow users to toggle Music | Podcasts | Audiobooks via persistent filters.  
5. Create a clear visual boundary between user-queued songs and Spotify-added songs.  
6. Ensure “Next Up” reflects exactly what will play without sudden changes.  
7. Move recommendations to a separate area to declutter the home page.
8. Have consistent user content in the Library structure.
9. Make an easier option for creating playlists.
10. Have clear rules for recommendations to not solely take over pages.
11. Look for a new feature to create that could gain some positive feedback to draw people back in to use the app.

With this brief complete, this will give me a good basis to make sure I’m sticking to the main issues of the problem and to target what the user would really want.

“Sometimes it feels like Spotify doesn’t understand the difference between ‘content I like’ and ‘content I tapped once.’ I listened to an audiobook sample and suddenly audiobooks took over my recommendations. There’s no way to say, ‘No, I don’t want this.’”

“I don’t understand the logic of the Library. I have playlists and albums and liked songs, but each section behaves differently, and I never know what I’m going to see. It feels like the system was designed by different teams who never talked to each other.”

“The home screen is chaos. There’s like fifty carousels and only the top two seem relevant. After that, it’s random podcasts I don’t care about or artists I’ve never listened to.”

“If I listen to one podcast episode, Spotify assumes I want to binge podcasts forever. I keep getting podcast recommendations clogging up the home page for months. It’s almost like a punishment.”

“A random slow song started playing in the middle of the party because Spotify thought it was a good recommendation. Not ideal.”

“Honestly, everything just feels kind of cluttered. I open the app and it’s this wall of recommendations that I mostly ignore. The stuff I actually want — like the playlists I made — is two or three clicks deep. I don’t understand why the app hides what I intentionally created and pushes a ton of stuff I didn’t.”

“Since they added audiobooks, everything is mixed together — music, podcasts, audiobooks. The categories don’t feel clean. It’s like they bolted features on top of each other.”

Now that I have a design brief, I put together a simple user flow to point out where I see the key features for this new design for the app to match the brief.

The way that I’ve broken it down is what are the main points that seem to keep coming back based on personal and outside information. With the first point of call being the home screen and right from the start the user will have access to content that is more tailored to them and is easy access with no recommendation style content. This allows the user to get to what they want to see right away without any recommended content and see things such as new releases or followed artists.

Then I have broken down to the other areas to three different sections, Explore, Radio and Search. These all have different needs which will help the user because it is broken up more. To start with Explore, this is your usual space for any recommendations as this was to separate this from the home content if the user wants to find new music or podcasts. Radio is a section where the current standard of mixes and radios stations can be found as it allows the users who only use these features to still have access to them. This also gives an opportunity to have more integration with other radio stations such as local ones. Finally I have made the decision to add a new tab section, with this it allows easier navigation when making playlists or wanting to keep certain artist pages open. This also feeds back into having more user control in the app.

The New Design

For the third image

Home

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For the third image

For the second image this is only scrolled down a slight portion but still on the home screen.

As we can see from this, the fact that Spotify has already removed any user created content (I.E. playlists or followed artists) and is instead pushing for more recommended content has shown that it doesn’t have the users interest in mind. This instead could be a perfect place to have the artists you follow or just an expanded area for the library, to make it easier for viewing than the side bar for the user if they wanted to have an expanded view.

Another factor to this is that the generated categories are randomly generated for the user, which while the sentiment of sparking inspiration is nice this will be a random event every time the user scrolls down, so if they see a category like “Soundtrack your Wednesday Morning”, there is no guarantee that the user will be able to view that again as it makes the decision based on what the user has listen recently. This is another instance where it could have been filled with content that the user would actually wants to see such as followed artists, proper new releases or created playlists.

For the third image, this is a closer look into the artists pages.

To begin with, based on my experiences, the way that albums are accessed are not user friendly. The way that they’ve tried to put it under one roof of discography just doesn’t work in this scenario, as they only show a few but it requires effort for the user to find relevant albums or songs they are after. It’s especially concerning that they have the space to spread these out but have favoured for more of their content like mixes and radios, which isn’t as relevant to the user.

This should be a place to easily browse what the artist has on offer and in turn for songs of the artists to become more popular because of the easy access, especially if it is an up and coming artist trying to get their music out there. Becoming a pain point for user and artist.

These are just some of my personal experiences with the desktop app but in order to do a proper analysis for how I would make changes, I need to complete research into what other people’s opinions are about the desktop app. This will lead me to look into alternative areas and figure out what the next steps are in order to create an improvement to the Spotify app.

Explore

Search

Extra Features

“I was trying to queue up songs for a party, and the queue interface was so awkward. I kept losing track of what was actually playing next because the queue mixes 'recommended songs' into the list without being obvious about it.”