A song sharing feature addition to Spotify

Student Project. https://justinfuss.com/project/spotify
The Problem:
Spotify’s mission is clear: “to help people listen to whatever music they want, whenever they want, wherever they want—in a completely legal and accessible way.” As a streaming music service, Spotify is the group lead and it wants to stay that way. For this reason, they want to improve engagement and retention in the app. In order to do that, they want to expand on their social capabilities. You will be helping them define what’s the best way moving forward in that direction, and provide them with a prototype of the feature(s) that you’re adding, integrated seamlessly within the rest of the app.

The Approach:
I applied the Design Thinking approach based on an iterative process to explore possible problems, barriers and pain points among Spotify users. This project was heavy in research, as I needed to understand the possible problems to be solved in a sharing platform on Spotify. I needed to understand the problems before I could begin ideating solutions. The ideation phase was very exploratory and allowed me to open up my mind to the many possible solutions before selecting the best one. Project duration: 80 hours.

Reflection:
This project gave me respect for the process of research and how effective it can be. The less strict project brief allowed me to do explorative research what problems exist in this space. Working with HMW statements, Crazy 8’s ideation and storyboarding allowed me to really explore possible solutions before diving into the first solution that came to my head. This project helped me learn how to work within an established brand’s guidelines.