Spotify: Design Patterns for Personalized Playlists

This is a hypothetical concept for a ‘Spotifone’ I created for a student project in 2017. The project was not associated with the Spotify company. It would be an ipod-like music player built around the Spotify platform with limited phone functionality

I’m a pretty heavy Spotify user. I use Spotify almost exclusively through my phone. Often, I will assemble playlists that I’ll tailor to a specific friend. I’ll combine their interests with stuff they probably have never heard. It’s the perfect gift: thoughtful and personal and it doesn’t cost any money!

Recently I decided to start working on a playlist for my cousin who has helped me out recently. His nickname is ‘Chef Kale’ (as an organic chef, it’s a fitting nickname!) so that’s what I named the playlist. I mapped out 3 different flows for how I would typically identify a song to add to this playlist.

Created in Whimsical

The three flows I identified were:

1. Using Spotify’s pre-made playlist ‘Discover Weekly’.
2. Using Search to find an artist or song I want to add.
3. Accessing my own previously made playlists to add to the new one.

Pictured: Editing a Playlist

With all the functionality Spotify offers, comes a little bit of clunkiness when it comes to moving around the interface. From the flow chart you can see it often takes clicking multiple times before getting to the next page.

The worst part of the pattern is that if you want to add a song your listening to one of your playlists (something I do all the time) you first have to click the ‘more’ button which is only represented by a series of 3 vertical dots. My playlist-creating flow is not prioritized the way other controls like ‘like’ are.

The best pattern comes outside of my task flow once you have multiple songs collected in a playlist, re-arranging them is simple. Once the user clicks ‘edit playlist’ the user simply drags the song to rearrange the playlist (which I do often

Though Spotify doesn’t tailor their experience to a playlist-creation task flow, they’re balancing a huge range of functionality for their users and this ultimately is probably used less often by the average user than I do. But crucially it hasn’t annoyed me enough to switch platforms.