Spotify — Xinyu Qiao's Protfolio

Friends Activity & In-App Chat Implementation

Spotify’s current social interactivity features are lacking and not intuitive. To combat this issue, our team redesign proposes an integrated messaging system within the app for easier song-sharing with friends. The design have also incorporated the ‘Friend Activity’ feature into the mobile app in the form of ‘stories’, which provides a more interactive experience when viewing friends’ listening activity.

Spotify allows users to access their friends’ listening activities through a sidebar on the Desktop app, encouraging users to better know each other’s music tastes and share their own. However, this distinctive feature has not implemented on their mobile version. In fact, many people do not even aware with this feature, which lead to a very passive user experience. Since the aspect of social networking is what differentiate Spotify from other music streaming companies, highlighting the interaction feature with friends is indispensable and important. ‬

Other than lacking focus on social interactivity, the current song-sharing user flow of Spotify Mobile app is not the most efficient or streamlined. Spotify currently only allows for sharing music externally via other apps, which creates extra steps and time to the users.

NetEase is a Chinese freemium music streaming platform. The chat system within NetEase allows users to share songs between their friends and community via the app. It ables them to follow singers or individual musicains on the platform, receive the latest music updates, and interact with favorite artists or fandom. Users can also choose to leave comments under the song, further extending the interaction experience in the community.

In conclusion, we found out that the chat room and user profile is an effective way to navigate users for interaction activities. It encourages users to scroll through the updates and click on individual profiles, spending more time on the app.

When conducting user research, we wanted to understand the user pattern of active Spotify users, and how they feel towards the song-sharing feature. The following is a list of questions that we asked:

When you’re on Spotify, what is one issue that stands out for you in regard to song sharing?
If a messaging feature is available, what would you use it more for – sharing songs or chatting?
Would you prefer to have a more intuitive sharing feature or fewer re-directing screens?
When it comes to song-sharing, what is something good that Spotify is doing?
How often do you find yourself wanting to share songs with friends/family?
How would you feel about having a DM with a verified artist you follow, getting to message them directly, and getting updates from them through the chat?
Do you use the desktop app?
Do you notice/pay attention to the friend activity column?

01//Initial Sketches

Design Draft: Home Screen & Song-Sharing

Friends activities are placed at the top of the home screen, users can scroll through their friends' icons to see what song they are currently listening to.

Song-sharing feature will took approach based on the current existing interfaces without changing the in-app user pattern.

02//User Flow

The goal is to mainly target the process of friends activities and song-sharing via the app, and the system results in a fluent experience of seamless transition between different listening activities.

03//Friends Activities

The friend activity section enables users to view what their friends are currently listening to within the mobile app, appearing at the top of the home page. Given that many Spotify users often add songs from others' playlists or Spotify's recommendations, this feature provides a passive yet effective method for song-sharing and helps users discover and expand their playlists.

"An easy way to share your love of music."