Our design process

Disclamer: This project was created during Way Out West Spotify Hackaton in Göteborg, Sweden, it is not the work of Spotify.

Desktop-grade mobile apps is a trap

The Spotify-player on mobile is currently very feature rich, it includes almost all features you can find on the desktop-client. This has disadvantages when it comes to ease of use on mobile. Obviously the cellphone has a smaller screen, but more importantly it's used at a fundamentally different basis. The thinking from desktop conflicts with the experience on mobile when it comes to complexity and interactions. To put it simple: How many taps until you get there?

On mobile the most important thing is the music, so we asked ourselfs. If we could redesign the Spotify-player from the groud-up, how would it be? The answer was something minimalistic, gesture-based, bold colors, and it breaths music.

The context of music

As of 2014, the post-skeuomorphism design provides less to none analog associations, which inherently gives designers less control of what users feel when they use the app. We wanted to create the feeling of music within the app, bringing the music closer to the user. We asked ourselfs, how would a deaf person know the music is there and playing? What makes people get that this is a music-app? The app should simply speak to all senses. Our answer to these questions was that transitions affect music playback and BPM-aware visual feedback.

Among other things we also thought out a concept we named Continuous playback, it's about non-interruptable playing music. It's about reducing the start/restart/stop, when switching songs you don't have to restart the song, it just continues where you left off.

One interaction away

Our app is all about speed and ease of use. Everything within the app is just one interaction away. We think this is the most important feature of the app since it's designed to be used when on the go. For this design-practice to work there must be a center of gravity within the app. A place where you always tend to be drawn. Another aspect we considered was the flow in the app, we wanted it to feel like there is a natual flow along with the music.

Testing, with paper-prototyping

To find the right interactions and design we used paper-prototyping. The iphone-frames are cut out from plastic foam and are great when testing gestures and transitions. We made four design propositions and the result was a mix of all of them.

We had a blast!

Thank you Spotify and Luger!

Update 2014-01-24

Seems we somewhat inspired Spotify. They have just released an similar way for previewing music.