Spotify Karaoke
Overview
Type of project Self Initiated
Duration 5 Days
Role Worked Alone
Tools Use Case, Task Analysis, Paper Prototyping, Figma
In this project, I attempted to add a feature to an existing app. I chose to work on the Spotify app and add a feature that would make it possible to have a karaoke party with friends on the app. My potential users are millennial music lovers who are comfortable using technology. I wanted the final outcome not to interfere with the everyday use of the app while also being easier to use than setting up a karaoke party with youtube and microphones/ a pricy karaoke kit.
Problem Statement
With the corona crisis and bars being closed more and more people are looking for activities they can do together at home. Many of my friends love going to karaoke parties and really miss going out and being silly. Organising a karaoke party at home can be expensive and often the host has to be in charge of the song order, finding good karaoke versions on youtube or in a karaoke kit that are usually quite limited. This lead me to my problem statement:
How might we create an easy to use feature in Spotify to make it possible to have a karaoke party?
Users & Audience
My potential users are Spotify users, who love music and hanging out with friends, They are tech savvy. They are mostly millennials (in their mid twenties til early forties). I’ve conducted interviews with 3 potential users for the feature, they are all Spotify users and karaoke lovers. I’ve asked them about what makes a great karaoke party, what they care about the most when they want to pick a song to sing and got a lot of information that helped me come up with the feature. Some of the responses I received were:
“The most important things in a good karaoke experience are being able to sing together because that's just way more fun! Also having a good variety to choose from, plus having lyrics - everyone forgets the lyrics sometimes”
“If Spotify had a karaoke function I’d like it to offer curated karaoke playlists by genre, decade, most popular karaoke songs, etc. As well as personally curated playlists with my favourite and top played songs and what my friends are listening to and singing.”
I’ve also created a persona, Sophia, to further help me understand the user’s wants & needs, motivation and frustrations and design around her.
Scope & Constraints
The timeline for this project was 5 days. Because I worked with an existing app, one of my major challenges was figuring out where in the app the feature would be. As a Spotify user who uses the app and desktop platforms daily I didn’t want the karaoke party feature to be on the main page in a way that would interrupt the daily use, but I also didn't want to hide it too deep where users wouldn't know how to get to it. Keeping that in mind I decided to place the feature in the “profile” page since it only has a few features on it and because your user name would be an important part of the karaoke feature.
The biggest challenge of this project was trying to design a feature that would use technology that has not yet been invented (or at least used by Spotify), in a way that would be easy for users to figure out while also staying in line with Spotify’s aesthetic and loved features (playlists and recommendations for example).
Process
After gathering the data from my research I started by creating use cases and conducting task analysis, looking at the task analysis I established that I would need 2 types of users to create a party - the host and the participant. I started ideating and thinking of the 2 flows. I sketched a paper prototype to create the 2 user flows starting at the home page of Spotify, creating the party or joining in, searching for and adding songs to the queue, opening your microphone and singing along and also a pop up informing you when you’re about to leave the party.
Outcomes & Lessons
Since this was a theoretical assignment the outcome of this project was a prototype and the last step was to conduct user testing which was quite successful. The users I tested understood the process of creating a karaoke party through the app, how to add new songs to the queue, and how it would work if the technology was available.
Overall I am very pleased with the UX I produced and wish I could collaborate with engineers to see if it’s possible to use a phone’s microphone as a karaoke microphone that could send over sound to the same outsource that would play it all together. If the project were to be fulfilled the next ideas I’d test would be adding an option to record and gamification of hitting the notes while singing.