Who are the users ?
Spotify Usability Evaluation
Why Spotify?
Given Spotify's popularity and role in users' daily life routines, understanding its usability challenges can offer insights into improving user experience for millions of users enhancing the interfaces' efficiency and intuitiveness.
This project explored how college students navigate and manage music experiences on Spotify—particularly focusing on playlist organization and social interactions.
Project Duration
8 Weeks
Team Size
6
My Role
UX Researcher
Who are the users ?
Who are the users ?
AGE: 25
OCCUPATION: Student
LOCATION: United States
Multi-Tasker
Creativity
Tech-Savvy
Dhruv is a graduate student, and music is an essential part of his everyday life. He uses Spotify daily, across multiple devices, but prefers the mobile version for its seamless, easy-to-use interface.
GOALS AND NEEDS
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Escape from stress and study routine: Uses music to lift his mood throughout the day.
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Playlist Organization: He enjoys creating, organizing, and managing playlists
FRUSTRATIONS
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Cluttered Desktop Interface: Finds Spotify’s desktop interface to be cluttered.
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Relying on external tools: Uses apps like Shazam to identify songs and then adds them to his Spotify playlist.
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Inaccurate Recommendations: The song recommendations given are not always what he wants.
What do our users say about Spotify......
To understand the common user perception of Spotify, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 long time users of Spotify
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Personalized Listening Experience
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Social Connection through Music
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Content Variety in One Place
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Creating and managing playlists takes too much time and effort.
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Adding Songs to a Playlist Isn’t as Simple as It Should Be
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Discovering New Music Often Happens Outside Spotify
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No Way to Share Songs or Playlists with Friends Within the App
Think Aloud Sessions
We analyzed Spotify's usability across three main tasks, generated based the challenges discovered during user interviews
TASK 1
Adding songs to their playlist from the Now Playing Screen
TASK 2
Navigating to friend's profile and exploring the songs they are listening to
TASK 3
Rearringing the order of music based on their preference from the playlist
Could users successfully complete tasks?
We calculated the Confidence Intervals for our findings from the Think-Aloud sessions to estimate how likely it is that users in the broader population would successfully complete each task.
TASK 1
If we repeated this study with task 1, 95% of those studies would show a success rate between 92.86-100%,
TASK 2
If we repeated this study with task 2, 95% of those studies would show a success rate between 78.57-96.50%
TASK 3
If we repeated this study with task 3, 95% of those studies would show a success rate between 50-74.62%
What does our data say.......
Probability of detection
With just 5 users, we were able to uncover
approximately 99.67%
of the major usability problems across our tasks.
What it means....
Probability of detection tells us how many usability issues we’re likely to catch based on the number of users we test.
System Usability Score
SUS of 53.13
A score well below the industry benchmark of 70
What it means......
The average usability score given by participants (out of 100) indicating clear need for usability improvements.
Confidence Interval: 43.85 – 62.39
T-Value: -3.27
Confidence Level: 99%
This is the range where the true score likely falls; even in the best case, usability remains below acceptable standards.
This shows how far our score is from the benchmark, the large negative value confirms the system performs significantly worse than expected.
This means we can be nearly certain that Spotify’s usability is below the standard; it’s not just due to chance.
Criticial issues identified......
The “plus” icon misleads users, they expect it to add to a playlist, but it adds to Liked Songs instead.
Users were unaware that they could view friends’ activity or didn’t know where to find it.
Playlist editing was described as cumbersome, requiring entering “Edit Mode” and scrolling through long lists.
How can we overcome these issues ?
Simplified Adding to Playlists: Improve the ‘plus’ button on the "Now Playing" screen by adding a dropdown that lets users choose between adding a song to "Liked" or a specific playlist.
This removes confusion and makes it clear where the song is going.
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Improved Friend Search: Add a dedicated search bar within the followers/following sections for easy friend discovery.
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Integrate friend search functionality into the main search bar, with clear cues, to increase visibility and usability.
Intuitive Edit Access: Relocate the "edit playlist" function to the main playlist screen, where users naturally look for it, enhancing accessibility and reducing confusion.
Simplified Reordering: Introduce a search bar within playlists for quickly locating songs and an option to move songs directly to the top, making playlist reordering faster and more efficient.
What I learnt....
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