Over three months we built out a completely new feature for Spotify. We partnered with Spotify in-house designer to create an experience that would make Spotify algorithm recognize and identify African genre. We regularly heard from listeners that people find it hard to search for African genre. So we worked hard to ensure the algorithm get the right information to improve the experience for listeners.

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Research

I started off my research with installing Spotify and Youtube Music on my phone. This being my first time experencing what is like to stream music from this platforms, I wanted to put myself in the shoes of an existing user. Then I Google search to know what African genres we have and what are the most popular to least. I compared the search result with everynoise. com to know the African genre Spotify already recoginses.

Competitive analysis

I also conduct competitive analysis with the platforms, I wanted to know how other Spotify competitors classify their music base on African genre.

User interview

After gathering information from my secondary research and getting myself knowledgeable about African genres and Spotify platform, I carried out 10 user interviews with my other fellows.

In other to get the best from all the insight, I converted all of my recorded user interviews and secondary research results into digital sticky notes using FigmaJam. After dropping all of my data onto sticky notes, I organized the information in search of repeated behaviours, pain points and similar trends of genres. Framing the problem statement into how might we, helped prepare my mind for ideation. I came up with several solutions, then I priotize my solutions using Impact-Effort scale.

During ideation, I thought about how the listeners would interact with the solution. I created the interface for the three main ideas and decided to prioritize the gamification based on users interview feedback.

I carried out usability testing with over 12 participant for each solution idea generated. I did different iterations with interview participant. My focus for this project was gamification but I would show the other solution design wireframes I tested with participant.

Adding gamification method with incentives

For this I came up with a different approach to add a ‘guess the genre’ game. When a user is listening to a particular song on Spotify a pop up with ‘guess the genre’ appears. The user can decide to pick a particular genre for the song or not. If the user select a genre, the user gets a point. When points accumulate over time the user can convert the point to money to pay for premium membership.

To align with our user’s expectations and the business goals, I redesigned and expanded upon the original idea to have more features. We moved the design to high fidelity and carried out two rounds of usability testing.