“Spotit” Spotify Feature
Spotit is an added feature aimed to increase the number of college-aged users on Spotify premium through the use of song-discovery and data-driven insights, allowing users to feel both confident in curious in their listening journey.
My Role
Product Designer
Project
Individual Project
Timeline
Spring 2023, 2 weeks
Tools Used
Figma, Spotify
Overview
Background
CS91SI is a class that teaches the essential concepts of UI/UX design and has its students create actual user interfaces in a project-based format. By the end of the class, students will have experience in creating handoff-ready, interactive high-fidelity mockups for a realistic product feature. Students were tasked with adding a new premium-only features on mobile for user-to-user social engagement. Expanding from personal music discovery to social music discovery will be a way to leverage our users’ own social networks to promote the product.
Design Process
Project Planning
Assignment | Spotify PRD
Challenge
Problem Statement
How might we add a new, premium-only feature on mobile to increase user-to-user social engagement as a way to leverage our users’ own social networks to promote the product.
Shazam to Spotify
Identifying value add
Shazam is an app that identifies music, movies, advertising, and TV shows by recognizing a brief audio clip. Users can simply open the app, tap to listen to a song or audio playing nearby, and Shazam will quickly provide details such as the title, artist, and album, along with options to stream, buy, or share the content. After recognizing a song with Shazam, users can tap a "Listen on Spotify" option, which opens the track in the Spotify app.
However, there is currently not an in-app Shazam integration within Spotify, making it so that users have to switch between the apps to identify and listen to songs. This led me to a solution called “Spotit” - a Spotify specific Shazam feature that allows users to search music directly in the app.
Spotit | Scanning Sound
Below shows the three-screen series of scanning and identifying a song. Similar to Shazam, the user will click on the Spotit button, prompting it to listen for nearby sounds. After a few seconds, the icon will change to a checkmark to indicate that the sound has been matched with a song. From here, the user will be taken to a separate screen to view the song and other relevant information.
Discover Insights
More than song discovery
Upon “Spotting” a song, users can click “Discover Insights” to learn more about the sound they just scanned. Once on the insights page, users can see more information about the song, including: the sound source it’s playing from, who is playing the music, the playlist that song is currently being played on, recommended songs, and more.
Personal Insights | Feel like an artist
For users who pride themselves in having a “good taste in music” and want to know if their friends like what they are playing, personal insights allow users to feel more like an artist. Built within your profile page, users can view their own insights to learn how many time the music they play is getting “Spotted,” which songs/playlists are getting the most attention, who is spotting their music, and where they get the most activity.
Feel confident in what you’re playing while also getting credit for your love of music.
Spotit | Video Prototype
▶︎ CLICK on the screen to play
This video shows the Spotit feature integration in it’s entirety.
The beginning shows a user using the Spotit feature to identify a song, which then leads the user to discover more insights.
From there, the user views their own insights to learn more about how their music taste has been received lately.
Lastly, the user toggles around with privacy settings related to the Spotit feature so that they can discover music more discreatly.
Reflection
Takeaways
This project was a lot of fun for me because I’m a big fan of both Spotify and Shazam, and I often use them to discover new music. Combining these two platforms into one integrated feature felt like an exciting way to boost Spotify's premium user base. After showing it to friends, their feedback was overwhelmingly positive—they not only loved the idea, but said they would use it frequently. It goes beyond just discovering songs; it creates a new experience for music lovers who take pride in curating their playlists and want to share their passion with others. Giving users the ability to "feel like an artist" by taking control of what music they play helps them build confidence in their musical journey while also increasing social engagement.
