Spotify

Allowing users to listen to clean music effortlessly

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Roles

UX/UI Designer
UX Researcher

Tools

Figma
Whimsical
Maze
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Duration

4 Weeks

Project Overview

Background

Spotify is the leading company in the music streaming industry and has continued to stay ahead of their competitors over the last few years. However, recently Apple Music has started to catch up and create real competition for Spotify. They want to improve engagement and retention in the app whether it’s by creating a social feature or a useful feature for music.

Design Challenge

Spotify’s current feature is all or none - meaning it will remove explicit content from the entire account if enabled. Based on research, users need the ability to block explicit content by playlist.

Design Objective

Research

In efforts to understand what users need and how we can accurately meet their expectations, I analyzed the other music streaming services and what they had to offer for explicit content control. I created some competitive and comparative research and conducting interviews to test my hypotheses and find any blind spots.

Secondary Research

Market Research

  • 487 million people subscribe to music streaming services; 158 million of those are subscribing to Spotify.
  • Spotify is the second leading music streaming service in the US with 47.7 million users while Apple Music is first in the US with 49.5 million users.
  • Google was the fastest-growing music streaming service in 2020, growing by 60%.

Demographics

  • 29% of Spotify’s users are Millennials.

Age groups by percentage:

  • 18-24: 26%
  • 25-34: 29%
  • 35-44: 16%
  • 45-54: 11%
  • 55+: 19%

Explicit Content Management in the Industry

  • Spotify’s current feature is all or none - meaning it will remove explicit content from the entire account if enabled and doesn’t replace the explicit content with cleanversions of the song but rather just skips over the song altogether.
  • Apple Music allows parents to block explicit content from kids. It will play the edited clean version of a song instead of the explicit version if it’s possible.
  • Amazon Music allows you to block playback of explicit music, but not “thematically mature” music.
  • No streaming service in the industry allows users to block explicit content from a single playlist.

Competitive Analysis

Primary Research

User Interviews

  • All participants said they need playlists to be clean fairly often in situations where there’s kids, family, friends, students, or work collegues around.
  • All participants said they would use a clean function as a parental control for their kids.
  • 4 out of 5 participants did not have effective solutions to the problem at hand - many anxiously skipped songs, listened to a safer genre instead of music they really wanted to hear, or listened to tolerable clean playlists
  • 4 out of 5 participants said they did not know about the current feature Spotify offers and that they would not use it.
  • 4 out of 5 participants said they think the ideal solution is a button in the playlists.

Define

During this phase, I identified the users that would find this feature the most beneficial and what their motivations would be to use it.

Persona

Ideate

After gaining insight from the research conducted, I focused on what these users expected and needed from this feature and what made the most sense to them.

User Flow

Task Flow

Sitemap

Sketches

Prototype

During the prototyping, I focused on staying aligned with Spotify's designs and creating a feature that would be cohesive with the rest of their app.

Low Fidelity Wireframes

High Fidelity Wireframes

Test

After running unmoderated testing, I found pain points that users faced and was able to come up with next steps to improve this feature.

Affinity Map

Pros

  • Very practical for everyday use
  • Helpful for certain situations
  • Easy to use for some users

Cons

  • Not as intuitive as some users would have liked
  • Some confusion in the settings

Priority Matrix

Next Steps

First Prototype

Prototype

Iterations

I eliminated the confusion around the clean icon and redesigned the control screen of the music player to reflect when the clean mode is activated and deactivated.

Playlist View

I wanted to keep this feature as simple as possible in order for it to be easy to use by all users. When users open a playlist, they’ll see a toggle at the top that allows them to make their playlist clean. This will replace any explicit songs with clean versions. If that option is not possible, it will gray out the song completely.

Control Screen

Another way this feature is enabled is through the controls found in the music player view.
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Similar to the sleep timer, the clean mode can be enabled and will turn green to reflect that it is active. This will only allow clean songs to be played and queued for the future.In this control screen, users can also choose to allow grayed out songs to be played in clean mode.
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I decided to use the broom icon next to the clean mode to stay in alignment with the design system Spotify currently has in place which demands that an icon be present next to the copy in the control screen of the music player.Next steps would be to do some testing to confirm whether this icon eliminates the confusion that the previous icon created.

Music Player

In my first version, I created an icon to represent the clean mode and used it in the music player as well as in the toggle at the top of playlists.

After testing, I realized that this icon didn’t communicate the clean mode accurately. In a blind testing, users said they thought it represented captions or lyrics.I decided to remove the icon entirely to eliminate confusion and stick to using the words “clean” and “clean mode” as much as possible.