Nicola Felaco, Associate Principal Product Designer

Design has all the time been a part of my life.

I grew up watching my Dad’s work and his typography work, drawing all over the place on my garments and pores and skin simply to experiment with it. At faculty, I used to be very enthusiastic about drawing something, from small molecules to massive geographic maps. By the age of 15, only for enjoyable (and later professionally), I began illustrating portraits utilizing geometric methods, which helped me learn to simplify advanced surfaces—such because the human face—by specializing in and highlighting their greatest particulars.

More and extra, I turned obsessed with observing and understanding folks, cultures, and gestures, making an attempt to seize them in notes, drawings, and footage—making the difficult easy.

It’s humorous that, once I was youthful, I needed to be both an astronaut or an industrial designer. I like dreaming massive and serious about objects in area, in addition to making an attempt to grasp the affect of human life as a part of a giant system. And I assume that is why I’m a designer at this time.

At greatest my work turns into invisible and a consumer can transfer effortlessly to their meant objective. My largest mission is to empower human beings and to turn out to be a future-friendly designer.

My mission is to each care for and construct a vibrant future imaginative and prescient for the Spotify participant expertise. As probably the most visited vacation spot on our app, my job is to make the place folks hit play on their music or podcasts, management what they pay attention, categorical their emotions, and join with artists and creators a significantly better and pleasant place.

1. Notes from conferences and workshops which might be ready to be digitized.

2. A particular mug from the Design Language System with their ten design rules on it. It’s my cool pen holder.

3. An inside framework of playable playing cards to make use of in design course of. It’s obtained our personas and design rules.

4. A Spotify-branded water bottle. A every day bodily reminder that I can do higher at consuming sufficient water. 

5. A humorous ice-breaker my staff got here up with to introduce ourselves in design workshops. This one was “design your llama.”

6. An iPad to sketch out concepts I need to embody in my decks.

Building the world’s largest lyrics catalog was my duty in a earlier job.

Although the corporate’s lyrics catalog was crowd-based, customers perceived their app largely as a music participant with built-in synchronized lyrics supplied solely by the corporate. How so as to add and sync lyrics to a track after they weren’t accessible was seen as unclear. In addition to that, when customers did contribute, the content material typically was not sharp sufficient to suit the catalog. Those customers have been additionally left with the sensation of not belonging to a neighborhood in any respect. The app had a few instruments designed to deal with these wants, however these have been far too hidden. 

My foremost problem was to tell apart the expertise for listeners and contributors, making them coexist and altering their present “solely music participant” mindset.

To do this, we mapped out the core journeys of our customers on present touch-points and located alternatives to introduce new ones. We believed that by enhancing consciousness of a centralized area for the neighborhood because the core of the app, with higher entry to contribution instruments and pointers, plus a gamification technique—on prime with leaderboards, exercise lists, and a rating system to reward them regionally, socially, and contextually—we may enhance topline metrics, outline values of customers to our system, and generate private consumer funding to return for the product and keep for the neighborhood. 

The answer turned out to enhance our metrics and revamp the app, giving us the power to generate a number of, richer knowledge on prime of music and lyrics as translations. But most of all, it allowed the consolidation of a stronger and aware neighborhood of followers nearer to their favourite artists and the model.

Daft Punk

On a every day foundation, music is what evokes me probably the most. Electronic works greatest for me, and I’ve all the time been fascinated by how Daft Punk composes its music, the method behind it. They by no means make simply one other album. Instead, they go into this temper of deep experimentation. They’re perfectionists.

Stanley Kubrick

Thinking outdoors of my work routine, I might point out films and their energy of visible storytelling. The foundations behind every part that defines the affect of tales, and the power to stimulate our senses and contain us emotionally and intellectually, are fascinating. To characterize that, I picked Stanley Kubrick, particularly when he mentioned that “the display screen is a magic medium. It conveys feelings and moods that no different artwork kind can hope to sort out.”

Marie Curie

Trying to grasp the affect of know-how on people and the elevating boldness of our gestures and questions, I’ve lately examine Marie Curie and radioactivity. I might additionally title her as a result of she jogs my memory of our obligations and the way exhausting it’s to get extra advantages than harm from new discoveries.

An enormous shout-out to all the attractive individuals who help me with relentless and beautiful friendship, even when a few of them I’ve solely obtained to satisfy in particular person as soon as. A particular one to my girlfriend and my brother, they’re simply wonderful.

It’s been one yr since I moved to Stockholm and joined Spotify, and I can say I’m engaged on some thrilling initiatives to share with you within the close to future. Meanwhile, when you have any questions or simply need to alternate experiences, let’s get in contact!

Follow me on Twitter @felasquez and Instagram @felasquez. 🙂