Before starting the case study, I will introduce myself first.
Let me introduce myself. My name is Reisky Khoelius. I am currently a dibimbing.id bootcamp student, I am taking the UI/UX designer class batch 24. I hope that by taking this class I can deepen my knowledge about UI/UX at this bootcamp. Maybe it’s enough to briefly introduce myself, let’s discuss the Spotify UX Research Case Study.
Overview 📖
This is my first case study as a Ux Researcher and I chose Spotify as my learning material. My main goal is to be able to understand more deeply the current Spotify user behavior and what user problems I can solve for them to increase comfort when using the Spotify mobile application. I will do desk research first, then conduct a user survey and conduct user interviews. After collecting all the data, I will create an affinity diagram, user persona and customer journey.
About Spotify🎼
Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming service, has become one of the most popular music streaming platforms in the world with a successful freemium business model.
Founded on April 23, 2006, Spotify was launched in India in 2019. Since then, the app has stood out with its user-friendly interface and advanced algorithm-based recommendation system.
Spotify has achieved a number of impressive achievements, reflecting its success in the music streaming industry
Mastering the Market:
Spotify dominates 31% of the global music streaming market, confirming its position as one of the market leaders.Global Expansion:
With availability in 184 markets, Spotify has reached a worldwide audience, expanding its impact globally.Active Users:
With 406 million monthly active users in Q4 last year (2021), Spotify continues to attract the interest of millions of users every month.Premium Customers:
More than 180 million people have subscribed to Spotify’s Premium service, demonstrating users’ desire for an uninterrupted music listening experience.Extensive Podcast:
With 3.6 million podcasts on its platform at the end of Q4, Spotify has become the go-to destination for podcast fans around the world.Popularity in Play Store:
With more than 100 Cr+ downloads on the Play Store, Spotify has succeeded in attracting the interest of Android users widely.Extensive Music Library:
More than 70 million songs are available on Spotify, ensuring that users have access to a wide variety of music from all genres.Rich Playlist and Podcast Content:
With 4 billion playlists and 3.2 million podcast titles, Spotify offers a variety of content for users to enjoy.
Spotify generates revenue through two main sources
Premium Subscription:
Users can subscribe to the Premium service to enjoy additional features such as ad-free streaming, offline downloading and better sound quality.Advertising:
In addition, Spotify also earns revenue from placing advertisements with third parties, which are displayed to users using the free version of the application.
With a sustainable and innovative business model, Spotify continues to carve its mark in the global music streaming industry, bringing an unmatched music listening experience to millions of users worldwide.
My role🙋🏻♂️
Ux Research
Project Duration⏱️
2 Weeks
UX Research Process👩🏻💻🔎
Research Objective🏡
My main goal is to be able to understand more deeply the current Spotify user behavior and what user problems I can solve to increase comfort when using the Spotify mobile application.
Hypotheses💭
I am an active Spotify user. I really like it because it can fill my days listening to music from Spotify. From my overall experience with Spotify it has been good, but there are several things that make me feel quite disappointing.
My disappointment
When creating a playlist there is no grouping feature according to the category of song we want and it feels complicated when searching for a playlist.
Confused when looking for a particular song because it is often confused with different artists and for official artists it is very difficult to differentiate them
There is no community feature on the creator/artist profile to provide feedback to the creator/artist
Goal🎯
After I experienced this problem as a UX Researcher, I thought maybe I wasn’t the only one facing this problem. Maybe someone feels the same as I did when using the Spotify mobile application.
For this, I started my UX research, which includes qualitative research.
Methods🔎
Here I use the qualitative research method (In-depth Interview). I want to be able to deepen my understanding of Spotify users using this method.
Sample Specification(Respondent Criteria)
I chose 5 respondents in this research with the following criteria:
1. Users listen to music/podcasts on Spotify mobile
2. Actively use Spotify in the last 2 weeks
3. Domiciled anywhere in Indonesia
4. Age 18 to 35 years
Key Information area
The key information area contains anything you want to know more about, and will be used as a reference for creating a list of questions:
1. User Profile
2. User habits when using the Spotify mobile application
3. What things do users experience when using the Spotify mobile application?
Research Guideline
After making a research plan, I compiled a research guideline for conducting interviews. The research guideline contains important points that I will ask questions to get insight data from users. The following are the main points that users are asked about:
What is the user experience while using Spotify Mobile?
Do users experience problems while using Spotify Mobile?
What other additional features do users need?
Conducting the research🔍
I explored the user experience when using Spotify mobile by conducting direct interviews and interviews via Gathertown. I got 5 active user participants from the Spotify mobile application.
Research Findings
To define user problems, I analyzed the interview results by listening to the voice recording of the interview results. This method aims to find deeper answers from the results of the interview. From the results of the analysis, I found several obstacles that users experienced when using the Spotify mobile application.
Affinity Diagram
After conducting the interview, all data obtained from the user will be grouped using an affinity diagram. Using affinity diagrams can help me to group the various information obtained, then this information will be analyzed to form a topic based on similarities in user patterns.
User Persona
Here I create user personas based on the results of interviews to help me understand users and solve the problems they experience.
Costumer Journey Map
Customer Journey Map is a user’s journey when interacting with a product. Here I get a lot of information about the user, such as what feelings the user feels, what obstacles the user experiences and opportunities that can be suggested to solve the problems the user experiences.
After I carried out the analysis, I found out what difficulties users encountered when using the Spotify mobile application.
Features that are hard to find
“Some of the features provided are difficult to find because they are hidden, making them feel frustrated and have to think of alternative ways to solve their problems.”
Song search
“When users search for music based on the keyword artist + song or based on the song title, they find it difficult to find official songs from that artist because they are mixed with other creators.”
Music playlist creation
“When they want to create a playlist, users feel really not in the mood because there is no grouping feature for songs based on their categories, which makes them create too many playlists so they find it difficult to find the songs they want to listen to.”
Listening to music
“When they want to listen to music, most users feel confused when reading lyrics from songs from foreign countries such as Japan, Korea and others, they hope for a romaji feature so they can read what the lyrics say.”
Share
“Users feel very strange or confused when sharing Spotify songs on social media, for example on Instagram, when they want to share on Instastory, there is no song and it only appears from the visual.”
Opportunities
From the pain points above, I got several opportunities that can be used to develop the Spotify mobile application.
Prioritization
After getting opportunities, I then set up prioritization to determine importance and urgency. This stage is carried out to determine which opportunities are the most important and urgent for the user to obtain.
What I’ve Learned 📖
I gained a lot of experience and learning in each session when starting this case study. starting from preparing research plans, the process of conducting research to getting opportunities that can help users’ problems. Apart from that, I also had a moment that made me interesting when doing this research when interviewing users who used the Spotify application to get the data needed in the research process and being able to understand what users felt while using the Spotify application. When we are involved in product development, user experience is very important for us to always pay attention to, because the experience that users experience when using our product really determines the sustainability of the product in the future. Don’t let users leave or don’t want to use our product anymore because their experience with our product was less than pleasant and we as UX researchers can’t listen to the problems users experience.
Appendix
Below is a link to the complete data from my research results
