Spotify Downtime

To start our project, we had to identify issues and opportunities within the existing Spotify app. As a group, we brainstormed common problems and looked online to ensure that other people experienced the same issues. We also did sketchnoting and user interviews to analyze listening habits better. Our group identified the relationship between the user and the algorithm, specifically the failure of differentiation between listening modes as an issue we wanted to focus on. In Spotify, users have different listening needs: sometimes they’ll listen to music recreationally and other times they’ll put on white noise to help them sleep, this doesn’t mean that the algorithm should weigh those listening patterns equally when recommending new music. (All sketches are mine.)

Once we decided on a direction, we began prototyping. We moved from low to mid to high fidelity wireframes and conducted user tests to gain feedback on our designs. One problem with our first mock-up was that we applied the existing Spotify design too heavily and it was difficult to distinguish between the Music tab and our Downtime tab. We added a brand splash with an animated banner at the top of the “Your Tracks” to visually signify to the user that they’re within the downtime space and reinforces the purpose of the feature.