Artist home on Spotify for Artists
Evolving the creator platform into a personalized, programmed and emotional experience that highlights relevant content and provides actionable guidance.
My role
Product Designer
Time
March 2018 – June 2019
My focus
Lead the design and strategy for Web and Mobile for the new landing experience in the Spotify for Artist analytics platform for artist teams, in partnership with internal teams across Spotify.
Spotify for Artist Web
Context
At the time S4A provided a collection of tools, but they don’t tell a cohesive story or provide actions to help empower and guide artists in their careers.
Solution Hypothesis
By developing a relationship between artists and our platform, we can help artists feel supported, empowered, & proud and guide them to take actions that further our goals of building a two sided creator marketplace.
Team
1 product manager
3 engineers
1 user research
1 data science
Metric goals
Drive >20% engagement with features across platform
Drive increase of 10% or more in time-bound features (artist’s pick, new release window)
Experience principles
Personalized, Insightful, Action-driven, Emotional, Delightful
Insights and research
Foundational user research
3 artist & 2 managers
We conducted an initial round of user research to probe into how users react to how communicate information on Spotify for Artists. (ie onboarding emails and playlist additions)
Artist participant (Shallou)
Artist participant
📲 Preferred communication method was in-app
These users are constantly checking the application, so it wasn’t helpful to receive emails of information they most likely already are in the know. In-app style updates would help cut through the noise.
🔔 Hesitant interest in push notifications
Participants mentioned they’d be interested in Push, but would want the option to turn it off as well as a way to tailor frequency and type of content
🫂 Everyone wants more guidance
Majority of the users wanted more information on how to best utilize the tools on Spotify for Artists, when and how they can measure or bench mark their success.
Usability research
4 Artists & 3 Managers
We conducted a second round of research to understand how we can drive user behavior and engagement with centralized locations of in-app style guidance and alerts.
Artist Home
A space to surface timely events & insights, providing users with an overview in order to help them: develop a meaningful connection with their data and be exposed to more Spotify tools, receive guidance, actions & recommendations.
Notifications
A web notifications feed will provide an inbox of important and timely alerts to: inform the user of significant events, confirm actions, and product news.
Prototype
Insights
Participants more meaningfully navigated the experience
Participants expressed a preference for an overview and used home as an entry point to different features throughout the product.
Expectation: highly dynamic and personalized
Participants also believed that the prototype would be highly dynamic and personalized to guide them on the platform based on their background.
Confusion around notifications
Participants expressed a lack of clarity around purpose and information within the notifications tray. There was a noticeable shared mental overlap between Home & Notifications.
Iteration and build
Post-user research, iterated towards a realistic experience based on our deadlines for the year.
New release window
No new release
MVP Launch
Coming out of user research, I quickly designed a simple overview focused on the last week in streaming for the artist, leveraging the artist’s artwork, imagery, and live viewer count directly on the landing page to help make the page feel personalized and lively/emotionally resonant.
Content type audit across Artist features
Iteration & prioritization framework
But as we scaled our platform to new features across the product, there grew a growing need to provide actionable guidance for our users. Our current layout was limiting the amount of information we could easily provide for our users.
We met with all product and marketing teams to understand the features and types of content categories our home experience needed to support.
Various card style explorations and content hierarchies
Workshopping styles, formats, values, tags, sizes, colors, etc. for individual card templates among team designers In order understand what kind of support feature teams needed and what new tools or insights were being developed, I consulted with all creator teams on form, function and use of a home card system.
Encorporation into information architecture
Option 1
Option 2
Incorporating existing designs of a data overview with programmed actions and insights was a tough challenge in evaluating a balanced information hierarchy.
Synthesizing feedback from the team we designed a compromise that helped maintain a sense of hierarchy of information whilst, creating a platform for action & experimentation first content.
4 card template formats
I designed a set of minimalist templates to suit our baseline needs across the existing feature set to drive action. We’re continually experimenting with content and format.
Guidelines and driving internal contributions
I worked with a UX Writer on a guidebook to drive feature teams to plug-in and experiment with card templates. This set the standard at the company for the ability to rapidly test styles, copy, and features.
Final web designs
Impact
37% average card engagement
Card engagement has consistently ranged from 70% to 10% depending on the relevance of the individual card to the artist for the past year.
Drives x2 feature usage
We conducted experiments on how home cards drive feature activation and usage and on average home cards double feature usage.
Drives 10% of new Revenue on SoundBetter
Spotify acquired a company called SoundBetter to help creatives find collaborators. Through our work, home drives 1k approved jobs per quarter since the acquisition by Spotify.
Bringing artist home to mobile
In collaboration with our mobile team, I worked with one designer to bring the mobile experience up to par with our quickly moving web platform. I embedded with him & their team to help kick off the effort.
I focused primarily on home & he focused on updating the music stats page.
Problem
There was an increasing disparity between the web and native app experiences. As we continued to grow our platform we were missing investing in a key strategic lever creating a broken experience.
Value / Opportunity
New, on-cycle users who view stats on their mobile app within their first week on S4A will retain at 85% over a 60 day period. Those who did not view their stats retained at just 50%. Mobile is a key metrics driver.
Cross team workshop
I led a cross-team design sprint to workshop assumptions and ideas across the two teams, where collaborated across mobile and platform teams to discuss possible features and the vision for mobile redesign.
User research
We then held a user research to understand the value of different features on mobile & user behaviors on the go on the third day of the sprint.
Key insights
Feature parity is an expectation at minimum
Users expected on par functionality and feature set on mobile. Some expected mobile specific differentiated features.
Low-risk, high frequency/urgency tasks
Our participants all noted that they use the application for high frequency & timely tasks but would prefer to perform higher-risk actions on web.
Simplicity & ease of access
Users still see the application as a utility, not a place to spend too much time. What’s most important should be easily usable & accessible.
Iteration & build
Simplify the experience, focus on programming the most timely & high frequency tasks
Visual experimentation with a similarly bold & text forward approach. Editorializing the experience a little more.
What’s the best model of traversing content? Card Stack? etc.
Time & constraints
Due to timeline & tech constraints, we focused on propping up existing card “templates” over a new UX paradigm from web. With limited time to bring feature parity, we focused on doubling down the value opportunity of making the home experience lively, engaging, and celebratory
Experiment with color values
Using color is tricky, but we wanted to make the release moment really “pop!” Since it’s the most exciting and scary moment in an artists career. I worked very closely with my engineer to develop a set of rules for a color-picking system that evaluates a palettes colors and creates an accessible two color text + background pair with special logic.
Supporting small, large, and off-cycle artists
Designing for every sized artists means creating divergent experiences! I worked with my data scientist to predict the likelihood a user would at least get 1 listener in an hour, otherwise the layout moves around to emphasize other info.
Motion with Lottie/AE
Live prototype build usability testing
Usability tested a live build of the experience with 4 artists & 3 artist team members in Los Angeles.
Insights
Positive reaction to home experience
“I like this homepage landing on this… it’s helpful.” Participants saw the surface as a place of added value.
Too much content
Participants felt there were too many things to do on the experience and that they took too much time to get through.
Build issues
The build had a number of untamable areas that were buggy which cause a bit of confusion when testing.
Final designs with improvements
Fixed moments where tappable elements weren’t correctly linked
Changed trending songs (an algorithmically generated trend point) to top songs for simplicity.
Reduced the amount and type of cards to be mobile specific only.
Results and impact
0% change in User retention
There was an overall flat retention rate in the following 60d retention.
8% higher engagement for home
Our mobile experience engagement is 45% higher than our web experience of roughly 37% the following month.
But…Lots of positive sentiment!
A lot of social sharing and positive sentiment surrounded our colorful hero.
Large amount of press (20+) and social engagement continues to this day by artists!
