Scheduled Playlists with Spotify

A feature to match music to your daily rhythm, either by yourself or with your favorite friends and artists.

Overview

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.

Timeline

8 weeks (Oct—Dec 2020)

Role

Solo project: Ideation, user research, interaction and experience design, prototyping, information architecture

Mobile Prototype

The Problem

The social disruption caused by COVID-19 has increased levels of loneliness and depression, especially in young adults.

Remote work is here to stay on a semi-permanent basis, and it is blurring the boundaries between work and personal life.

The Solution

A feature where users are able to create and schedule their own playlists according to their daily routines, or join other friends' or artists' playlists. This creates the opportunity to be present in a virtual music space together with friends and artists, and facilitate habit forming through music.

View Design Process đź”’

'Scheduled Playlists' is a feature where you can:

  1. Schedule tracks to play automatically to match the rhythm of your day.
  2. Join scheduled public playlists made by your favorite artists or friends and listen to them together in real time.

Use Cases Demo

Why would Spotify want this?

  1. It allows creators to feel more connected to their following and vice versa.
  2. The input of human-based recommendations into an algorithm-based app could strengthen business-consumer relationships, potentially attracting more customers to Spotify.

Reflections & Next Steps

Social isolation is difficult and there is no substitute for human connection

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.