In the past couple of years since Spotify has gotten into podcast streaming its pulled many users away from Apple and Google Podcasts due to the convenience of being able to listen to music and podcasts in one place. The experience of listening to podcasts on Spotify has improved a lot since they were initially launched on the app, but there’s still ways the experience could improve. For the purposes of this project I focused on the process of finding new podcasts that users will actually like and continue to listen to. Trying new podcasts can feel like a big commitment due to their length. Is there a way to increase the likelihood of users trying out and sticking with a new podcast?
I spoke to five users with varying podcast listening habits. 5 participants: 3 men, 2 women. Average age 29. All users have Spotify but 2 use Apple Podcasts. The amount they listened varied. Most of the people I talked to tended to only look listen to ~2 podcasts on a regular basis. They all reported that they enjoyed giving recommendations when it was relevant. Most had solicited podcasts requests on social media and replied to other people giving these requests. Participants said they are unlikely to try listening to the podcasts that the Spotify algorithm recommends to them and said they are much more likely to try listening to a podcast that was recommended by a friend or one that was related to a show or an entertainer they were already a fan of. Only one interviewee said they had tried a Spotify podcast recommended podcast that they became a regular listener of. Reviews and rankings did not hold much value among this group. This group tend to only look for new podcasts when they become bored with existing shows they listen to or when they’re about to take a long trip somewhere. Several said that they’d be interested in a feature that showed them what podcasts their friends were fans of.
To get the idea generation process started I wrote down different problems I was hearing from my users and brainstormed all the potential solutions I could think of.
The problem of not remembering recommendations rang true for my participants and myself. There's no simple solution for this problem. Either you have to maintain a list somewhere, like one of my users, or you have to have a great memory. For the less organized of us, I wanted to think of a way for these recommendations to not get lost in a text chain as they so often do.
I started this process by drawing out the existing podcast discovery userflow and then drawing on to it the ideas I’d come up with.
The central components of this update are:
The “Save for Later” playlist would pull out suggestions to add to the playlist automatically from the inbox messages.
By allowing users to ask their friends for recommendations through Spotify, it’s easy to save all the responses they get in one place. The record keeping task is no longer on them.
The Spotify link, when posted on social media, will lead directly to that user’s inbox, prompting them to search and add a recommendation. These recommendations will then be accessable to the user through their inbox located on the homepage. When they open the message they’ll be prompted to either save the recommendation or to dismiss it. Dismissing it doesn’t show the sender what happened, but simply tells the app to not suggest adding this podcast in the future.
In order to truly solve the problem of forgetting the recommendations sent by friends, the Save For Later playlist will directly pull recommendations from the inbox and suggest them as additions. That way, if the user forgets to respond or check their inbox there’s redundancy in place to remind them to try out these new recommendations. Or if you’ve heard it already, or you’d rather not give it ago, remove them from the suggestions list.
Part of this update involves multiple mechanisms for sharing your recommendations with others. You can either go directly from the podcast or music page, through the inbox, or directly from the individual’s profile on Spotify.
5 users were asked to perform the tasks in this userflow and asked about their expectations for different features. 4 out of 5 of my users did not think to go through the profile page to create the "Ask for recommendations" link. This lead me to create an alternative pathway to create this link through the inbox message box. My users took alternative ways to achieve my tasks but there was a 100% success rate. with no other features causing major sticking points.
This project showed me that there truly are infinite solutions to user problems when you are able to enter a project with an open mind and a commitment to understanding the research. My first instinct was to approach this project solutions first and interface first- but after breaking down my user interviews and isolating the problems, I discovered that I had many more ideas to play with that I would have ever imagined. At first I was uncertain about how to go about adding an unprecedented feature into an existing interface. Through looking at the visual language of other features on the app, as well as similarly stylish and successful apps with inboxes, a way forward emerged.
