"How might we improve the discoverability and organization of Spotify's search page to help users find their desired content more efficiently and explore new media without being overwhelmed by clutter?"
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
October - December 2024
Project Type
Independent Project
Tools & Skills
Figma, User Research, Prototyping
SUMMARY
As someone who listens to music 24/7, I've spent countless hours navigating Spotify to find my next favorite song. While I love the platform, I noticed some recurring frustrations with its search and discovery features. Driven by a desire to fix these issues for myself and other users, I undertook an independent design project to reimagine the Spotify search experience. This process involved conducting user interviews, developing a user persona, creating prototypes in Figma, and conducting user testing to gather feedback on the design.
01 Project Overview
Spotify Home Discovery
I chose to tackle a design challenge on a platform I use daily: Spotify. My goal was to improve the cluttered and inefficient search and discovery experience. Through various rounds of user testing and competitive analysis, I developed and iterated on a high-fidelity prototype that introduces more intuitive navigation and enhances discoverability.
My Solution—
My solution was a redesign of Spotify's search page, introducing filterable tabs for different media types and a new audio-based search function to reduce clutter and improve content discoverability.
02 The Problem
What new thing should I listen to today?
While Spotify excels as a streaming service, its mobile search page presents several usability challenges. My initial analysis and first round of user testing uncovered three key issues:
Disorganized Content: The "Browse all" section is a jumble of music genres, podcasts, and audiobooks, forcing users to endlessly scroll to find what they're looking for. This lack of visual or semantic grouping increases cognitive load.
Irrelevant Prioritization: The "Start Browsing" section dedicates significant space to podcasts and audiobooks , content that many users, who primarily use Spotify for music, find unnecessary and distracting.
Missing Search Features: Unlike competitors, Spotify lacks key accessibility features like the ability to search by lyrics or by humming a tune.
Competitor Strengths
Humming and dictation search
Separate library and platform search
Visually dynamic categories
Competitor Weaknesses
Lacks a broad range of categories
Endless categories/scrolling can overwhelm users
Vague filter labels
This analysis revealed significant opportunities to enhance Spotify's user experience by addressing key feature gaps and usability issues. This led me to a new guiding question for my design process: "How might we improve the discoverability and organization of Spotify's search page to help users find their desired content more efficiently and explore new media without being overwhelmed by clutter?"
03 User Research
What did I learn from users?
I interviewed 4 music enthusiasts to understand their music-discovery process and decipher the pain points that user's face and seeing how Spotify's current methods could be more streamlined to fit user needs. My user interviews included a set of tasks to observe how participants interacted with Spotify's existing features. I focused on three key areas to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. Here's what I asked and some findings:
Discovery and Navigation
1. Find the R&B genre section.
2. Find the section for new music recommendations.
4. Locate and play a podcast or audiobook.
Content Management
1. Add one song to three different playlists.
2. Filter your library to find playlists made by Spotify.
Listening and Playback
1. Queue two songs.
2. Activate the Crossfade feature and set it to three seconds.
3. Change the audio quality to high.
75%
users struggled to find a specific genre or new music section.
Overall Sentiments:
Difficulty with settings and features.
Challenges with navigation and discovery.
Unintuitive library organization.
The major takeaway? Users want efficiency and discoverability.
To find music, users want a familiar and easy-to-use interface. While Spotify's current search functionality fulfills some basic needs, the process of navigating its cluttered pages and finding new, relevant content is inefficient and untrackable. Keeping tabs on new music, podcasts, or audiobooks can be frustrating if the "Browse all" section is disorganized and lacks a clear visual hierarchy.
04 Ideation
Exploring and experimenting solutions
I moved from rough ideas to tangible designs. I began with critiquing Spotify's current pages and developing lo-fi sketches to quickly visualize my concepts and explore different layouts for the redesigned search page.
From there, I created 2 separate flows that both served the same solutions I wanted to have in mind with different paths of navigation. Redesign #1 aimed to re-organize content into distinct sections, while Redesign #2 introduced filterable tabs for different media types directly under the search bar and added a microphone icon for audio-based search.
05 Design + Iterations
The final concept
Making iterations through user testing
Redesign #1 aims to differentiate between these by having buttons for the different categories at the bottom of the search landing page. Redesign #2 uses filter buttons underneath the search bar, so that users can easily filter what type of media they want to browse. In addition to this filtration, redesign #2 organizes the different genres semantically so that more similar items are grouped together.
Recent browses for improved efficiency & less cognitive load
Lacked easier discovery for different music categories
Quicker tab navigation + discoverability to access categories
"Browse All" is easily identifiable under respective category
After conducting my second round of user testing, I found that most users preferred redesign #2. Interviewees noted that in redesign #2, there were fewer steps to get to the more wanted features. The layout was more intuitive in terms of prioritizing content. All of the users mentioned that the filter functionality between music, podcasts, audiobooks, and live events was very helpful and helps to organize the content of the pages into their respective sections.
Final Design: Prioritizing Importance on the Home Page
With the feedback I received, I iterated on both the strengths and weaknesses of my flows to finalize my prototype. I ultimately went with the categorical view and a expandable browse to align with Spotify's use of boxes to categorize and to mimic the UI of opening an album's contents. This is also the least crammed out of the screen options which allows for a familiar vertical visual flow of information.
06 Outcomes
Returning to my classmates and friends, I conducted a user interview session to test the new product. The feedback was positive, with 91% of users reporting that the implemented changes were easier to perform!
A preview of my user interview response and analysis!
Ways I plan on refining the user experience would be to incorporate deeper visual cues and/or micro-interactions such as icons and animations to make tabs and filters more distinguishable from each other. Following this, music finding features via audio sounds (as seen left) and filters such as “Saved” preferences and filters could allow users to customize the order of categories and choose media they want to prioritize to make their experience more personalized.
07 Key Takeaways & Looking Forward
Looking back, what did I learn?
In the early stages of the redesign process, we learned that users cared a lot about not only functionality, but discoverability. Since Spotify has a lot of moving parts, it’s really important for our users that they can be able to find things quickly and easily, without getting too lost in all of the different features. By collecting this data and then making sure that our redesign decisions were based on it, we were able to create redesigns that increased efficiency and ease of use when it came to navigating the search page for our second round of users.
Designing for an everyday app was both challenging, to not introduce self bias, and fun! If I had to talk about limitations, as most of my interviewees were undergraduate students, I was focusing on a narrow age range which could introduce biases in how features are prioritized, such as social sharing (more popular among younger users) versus accessibility options (which may be more critical for older users) and will limit seeing the diverse range of behaviors across other demographics. If I revisit this project in the future, I'd love to research a larger demographic of users to fully grasp behaviors and needs across different age groups and backgrounds. This project had taught me a crucial lesson: discoverability is as important as functionality. An app can have great features, but if users can't find them, they won't be used.