ADP: Application Design Proposal Project
Personalization and Customization in the Spotify App
Background
Customizable and personalized content and interfaces have seen rapid growth recently and have caused a shift in business models towards tailoring to users (Pouli et al., 2015). According to Kim (2020), 74 percent of consumers say they feel frustrated when a website lacks personalization. Spotify is one of the most popular music streaming applications and has a very tailored user experience. The platform is known for creating personalized playlists for users and has even gone as far as making the experience of finding and organizing music highly customizable.
The Spotify app released new features in 2022 including a new library interface. Prior to the update, libraries were sectioned into four categories: playlists, artists, albums, and podcasts/audiobooks. This updated library organized listeners’ music into more categories and subcategories such as “playlists by you”. Users now have more options to filter their music to help narrow their search for specific content. In addition, the app’s home page displays listeners’ most recently played content and personalized recommendations of music, podcasts, and more.
Method
I will conduct a heuristic evaluation on the newest version of the Spotify app in order to analyze how well it conforms to the UX principles and determine how usable its highly personalized and customizable features are. Two evaluators will spend 5 minutes exploring the three main pages on the app and identify any errors.
Average = 4.5
SD = 0.5
Se = 0.29
t = 4.303
Cl = 4.303 x 0.29 = ±1.25
Results
The total number of errors reported was 11 with 3 minimal errors, 5 moderate errors, and 3 highly severe errors. The average number of errors was 5.5 with a standard deviation of 0.5. The confidence interval was ±1.25 with a 95% confidence level.
Conclusion
Based on the average number of errors and the calculated confidence interval, the Spotify app has an average amount of errors. The evaluations showed no errors for consistency and feedback and no more than two errors for any other UX principle. The platform has shown to be very user-centric by focusing on developing features that help users create and explore content. Spotify displays many of the principles well and with few errors such as speak the users’ language, shortcuts, and good errors and preventative errors.
Speak the users’ language
Despite one reported error, the Spotify app speaks the users’ language very well. Their use of icons is very straightforward and effective and the terms they use are easy to understand. Their pop-up menus and the stationary navigation menu on the bottom include both icons and titles of the action or page to avoid confusion. The order of the pages on the navigation menu is very similar to other applications such as Instagram which connects to users’ conceptual model.
Shortcuts
The Spotify app features many shortcuts that enhance users’ experience and reduce the time and clicks to complete common tasks. One of these features is that listeners can swipe a song to the right to queue it instead of clicking the menu and then scrolling to and clicking the “add to queue” option. Because queuing songs is a frequent task made much easier by this shortcut, this is a good example of how Spotify understands how the user interacts with their system.
Good errors and preventative errors
Spotify gives users the opportunity to explore the app and create freely by allowing for good errors. Users can easily remove a song from a playlist, delete a playlist, un-save or un-download content. The app also prevents errors with features such as an alert that a song a user is about to add to a playlist is already added. These features help the user feel more in control and have little to no worry about making mistakes, thus encouraging them to explore more.
Issues
The biggest issue found while evaluating the app was an overwhelming amount of content and options shown to the user by default. This caused a few errors reported against minimizing user memory load. For example, when first opening the app, a user will be shown their entire library in one single list after navigating to the library page. This means that every playlist they have created, artist they follow, albums they have downloaded, or podcast they have saved will appear on one lengthy page. The library has very useful filters which hide content and help users find what they are looking for. However, the default view of the library is overwhelming and displays much more than the user needs. This is not user-centric because it is unlikely that a user would take the time to scroll through such a long list instead of using the category filters.
Spotify’s focus on a personalized, customizable user experience is likely one of the main contributors to their growing success. The conformance of these features to the UX principles shows how usable and enjoyable the platform is to users.
References
Kim, M. (2020). The power of personalization in User Experience. Medium. https://uxdesign.cc/the-
power-of-personalization-in-user-experience-f3719402bd2
Pouli, V., Kafetzoglou, S., Tsiropoulou, E. E., Dimitriou, A., & Papavassiliou, S. (2015). Personalized
multimedia content retrieval through relevance feedback techniques for enhanced user experience. In 2015 13th International Conference on Telecommunications (ConTEL) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.