The D&AD New Blood Award had a Spotify brief involved coming up with a way that people could share music easily within the app as well as make Spotify a social experience.

Spotify

UI design

The Process

The phrase in mind when coming up with ideas for Spotify was “How can Spotify make listening experience a social experience?” New features need to be simple and easy to create in order for them to be put into place in the near future. When thinking of ideas, I first thought of features I would like to see on Spotify, the second step was to ask a number of people what they thought of these ideas.

From what I gathered, the main feature Spotify could introduce, is sharing music directly within the app. The next question is, does Spotify need to introduce a messaging board in order to do so? With the amount of social media apps today, there is no need for another one to be made. This way the new features that are introduced will be spread on other social media platforms.

Another feature that is worth intoducing is making profiles more interactive and personal. This thinking lead to the idea of customisable profiles which could increase Spotify’s screen time. The initial idea was to create a day & night theme or abstract design aesthetics. These however, did not go with Spotify’s current UI aesthetic and needed to be simplified. I decided the best way to tackle this is expression through colour. Colour is used to convey vibes and emotions in a minimal way that is still aesthetically pleasing.

The Idea

Feature 1: Music is made to be shared so why not share music directly on Spotify? The new gramophone feature allows you to share songs and playlists with the people you love.

Feature 2: Music can also be personal and define who you are. The second feature created allows you to personalise your profile with colours that best suit you or simply match your music’s vibe.

Design Aesthetic

When coming up with the icon design for the share music feature, I decided a gramophone would suit the icon best as Spotify uses vinyls to showcase their music and this would also suit their retro modern aesthetic.I was inspired by the gradient colours Spotify uses in their adverts and felt that this could also be used as the colours used to personalise the profiles.

sample images

How the features will work

The Gramophone feature will allow you to share music with anyone that has music sharing on and let you pick a song or playlist for them as well as customise the cover photo to make it personal, this feature also has an option for you to say a few words before you send the music.. it could be as simple as “This song made me think of you.” The customisable profile gives you the option to choose a colour for your profile, the new feature also depicts orbs around your profile picture that begin to move to the beat of your music when you press play.

View the concept walkthrough to see how these work!