How we helped Spotify understand fractures across their user experience and uncover ways to secure a long-term customer lifecycle

Client: Spotify
Role: Product Design Lead
Agency: Wunderman Thompson
Year: 2023

The last few years at Spotify have included rapid market expansion and the launch of several new multi-user plans have added complexity into the customer experience.

With ambitious targets for the next few years, Spotify needed to ensure that their core user journeys and lifecycle communications align with user needs, and were looking for a fresh perspective on how to improve them.

Objectives

Take a user-centric and holistic view of core customer journeys and identify both fractures and opportunities for improvement to the experience, growth, and retention of users.

Conduct in-depth expert research across multiple markets, plan offerings, and devices.

Uncover barriers related to Premium upsell, product education, and accessibility.

Provide rationale on areas to invest in the future.

In order to understand where issues might exist, we mapped out the end-to-end customer experience by analysing five key journeys across three markets and multiple touchpoints within the iOS and Android mobile apps. We didn't have access to data so were dependant on our own experience and intuition.

Our findings ultimately informed both short-term tactical recommendations and opportunities for Spotify to grow and retain users in the long-term. We validated our findings by sending out an extensive survey to customers.

Through our analysis, we found the same issues to be prevalent across all of the key customer journeys.

01 Users struggle to understand key information about Premium and easily make changes to their plan.

02 Design and accessibility issues are present across the entire Spotify ecosystem.

03 The personalisation we all know and love about Spotify disappears outside of the core listening journey.

Touchpoints & best-in-class

Through a comprehensive touchpoint analysis, we synthesised key findings and opportunities into actionable recommendations.

To effectively communicate our insights and opportunities to the Spotify team, we created an interactive Figma prototype that facilitated a deeper understanding of our recommendations.

A rigorous competitor analysis looked at various journey phases across similar platforms. This served to inspire potential solutions, prioritise improvements and justify design decisions.

Experience map and
recommendations

The final experience map represented the culmination of extensive research conducted by the team. It served as a visual representation of the insights and discoveries we uncovered.

By integrating findings from all five journeys and incorporating insights from various data sources, it provided a holistic view of the Spotify experience. This comprehensive perspective was instrumental in shaping our key recommendations.

We identified five key areas to help improve user experience and increase overall growth and retention.

01 Increase awareness of Premium by signposting to it at key moments.

02 Better educate users on the benefits of Premium through more succinct descriptions and by making ads more compelling and timely.

03 Bring cohesion and clarity across touchpoints through well-maintained and governed design guidelines and the creation of accessibility standards.

04 Give users more control and transparency around upgrading and downgrading.

05 Show customers they know them through more personalisation experiences. Targetting users with more appropriate offerings and relevant/compelling ads & emails can build brand loyalty.

UI concepts

We also supplied the Spotify team with a range of UI concepts to visually demonstrate the potential implementation of our suggested solutions.

Impact

Spotify promptly began implementing some of our recommendations with various moments across app, web, email and ads featuring consistent and accessible colouring with a clearer and more defined purpose.

Premium subscriptions increased by 10 million in Q4 2023.