A feature to match music to your daily rhythm, either by yourself or with your favorite friends and artists.
This is a new feature proposal for Spotify called "Scheduled Playlists". With this feature, you can schedule any playlist to play at specific times of the day and join other live public playlists made by favorite artists and friends.
8 weeks (Oct—Dec 2020)
Solo project: Ideation, user research, interaction and experience design, prototyping, information architecture
Research has found that there has been an increase in depression among young adults (aged 18-23) during the pandemic, with loneliness accounting for much of this increase. Per the Journal of Adolescent Health, targeting loneliness is warranted given this may have important downstream effects on mental health.
The surge in remote work brought on by COVID-19 has blurred work-life balance, creating the dilemma of when exactly work time begins and ends. The shared work and play environments have disrupted existing lifestyles and daily habits by erasing prior environmental cues tied to our habits.
Despite the problems posed by social distancing and the pandemic, there are still opportunities created by the current circumstances.
People are online now more than ever.
With more time spent indoors, we are presented with the opportunity to reimagine our relationships with music.
More people now have access to a private work space, allowing freedom and control over their environments, including what they listen to.
To start off my design phase, I:
Solution Idea 1
Solution Idea 2
Method:
Goals were to:
Methods:
Information Architecture
One challenge I ran into at this stage of the process was validating where to locate this feature—both visually and architecturally—in the mobile app. I initially had included the feature under the playlists section of the app in "Your Library", but I realized that this feature should be more discoverable from the homepage and should also have a distinction from other playlists.
After deliberation and feedback, I added a section for "Scheduled Playlists" in between the Playlists and Artists tabs and made the schedule accessible through both the homepage and "Your Library". Though I made this feature exist under the music category for this project, it may need to fall under a larger umbrella if it hypothetically were to be used for podcasts as well.
Insight 1:
Insight 2:
Insight 3:
Why would Spotify want this?
This feature idea is only one positive way to approach the problem space of making up for the lack of physical human connection, and is in no way a replacement for such connection. Having music to match your daily habits and sharing these moments with others may be effective for some, but it cannot replace human cues, which are often the littlest things, such as morning coffee runs or exchanged glances with coworkers at the end of the work day.
Things I would like to improve:
My current proposed feature is a combination of multiple smaller features. If I had more time with this project, I would want to narrow down my ambitions by going more in depth into one or two main features, and nailing down the experience and visual language. I would also like to further explore the information architecture to make sure that this feature is placed under the most intuitive information categories.