Prompt
Our goal for this project was to Be able to improve and add upon Spotify's current Collaborative/Social Features. At the moment, the application Spotify does not have very many social features or ways to interact with other users on that platform, we had a look on how we could change that for the better.
focuses:
Different needs both socially and from platform.
Variety of different backgrounds and familiarity.
Focus on social features that exists.
Meet the Team!
Everyone essentially had the same role, which was recruit research participants, test users, and compile results. However, Marco and I did specialize in creating the final prototype.
Persona
It was important to create a realistic persona to ensure that we had specific audiences in mind for the project. The persona I made, which you can see above, is Gabriella Sparkman. She is a college aged student who is very passionate about a specific kind of music, that being metal, and wants to find a community within it. based on this, in terms of recruiting for research participants and usability tests, we aimed toward testing college students who are already familiar with one or more streaming services.
Journey Map
Here you can see a possible route that Gabriella may go through when deciding on what streaming service to subscribe to.
Research Method
the method we chose to research was an Online survey
The demographics were mainly be based on the users of music streaming services, and our goal was at least 20 research participants (which we collected well over 40).
We sent out the survey to people we know through Email, Discord chat, and social media. Participants had to be familiar with using a streaming service, preferably spotify.
our primary goal of the research was to Collect data from survey results.
Goals:
- Focus on discovering what features users enjoyed.
- Goal is to understand user’s attitudes toward social features.
- Asked questions like: would you like a forum or comment section added to Spotify?
Findings
Based on what we found from the survey:
- The research participants wanted to share their music taste and tracks.
- Wanted their own profile.
- Did not want Spotify to turn into a social media platform.
- Did not want a comment section or forum type features added.
Prototype
Feel free to check out the prototype here: https://www.figma.com/proto/DMdnxuryYjdE4Aoax3RQPi/Rough-Mockup?node-id=59%3A3&scaling=scale-down&page-id=0%3A1&starting-point-node-id=7%3A39&show-proto-sidebar=1
The next step in the process was to test out our prototype. so we conducted 5 usability tests.
Questions asked during the usability test:
- How would users feel if existing social features were grouped together using an activity feed/profile?
- How would users share their own listening or viewing activities to their friends using an updated social profile and activity feed?
- What are collaborative social features that your streaming currently has that you enjoy using?
- How would users like listening to the same songs with other users simultaneously in a group session?
Usability Test findings
The main things that we learned while evaluating was that there was no solid flow to our prototype and there were a bit of misleading visuals and icons. The biggest positives was the set up of the site and the consistency between the prototype and the original Spotify app.
Conclusion
Based on what we learned from the survey and prototype there are several ways to take a step forward with this collaborative product. First things are to improve the icons on the prototype and making it more of an open platform to simulate what the user would actually be doing on the app. after improving the prototype, maybe perform another usability test and ask the user what other collaborative features they would like to see on the platform.