Spotify Blend: Designing for a Social Listening Experience

Your telephone buzzes. In it, a shiny notification lights up the display screen: [Your friend] has invited you to hitch a Blend. 

When was the final time you heard from them? It should have been months, perhaps even a 12 months. It’s been laborious to remain in contact. You’re each so busy and stay hours away from one another.

You settle for the invite and the very first thing you see is your go-to karaoke duet, accompanied by each of your faces on the monitor. As you take a look at the remainder of the playlist, all of it comes speeding again to you: late nights at your favourite bar, dinner events together with your group of mates, and all the highest hits you sang on highway journeys throughout the nation. And only for a second, as you soak in nostalgia, it appears like they’re proper there subsequent to you. That’s what Spotify Blend is all about.

Spotify Blend: a brand new period of social

Spotify Blend is a customized playlist that routinely combines two customers’ audio tastes collectively. It’s an easy and efficient solution to keep linked — a reunion with an outdated buddy, or an intimate introduction to somebody new. It helps you to share your music style with others and provides you suggestions from family members. It’s true to who you might be and the way you hear. 

It was an fascinating product to design as a result of Spotify is at a novel vantage level in the case of social listening. Through Blend, we’re capable of facilitate sharing music with out counting on user-generated content material the identical manner that conventional social media platforms do. This gave us the house to design an expertise that’s simply… enjoyable! 

Of course, we additionally needed to concentrate on offering management and accommodating completely different tastes, however this was a product we had been capable of craft for consumer delight — sharing your music with somebody merely since you need to.

Designing for consumer management

Music is inherently social and there’s a rising affect from different platforms, as we’ve seen from all of the viral hits which have been topping the charts this 12 months. Although we love to point out off enjoyable knowledge factors about how we hear, there’s nonetheless one thing very intimate and personal about music that we wish to protect. When making the audio house social, there may be stress to current your self a sure manner. We approached this thoughtfully, realizing that we usually curate what we share with the world.

In designing social experiences, we advocate for consumer management, which is how Blend works. It’s a simple opt-in, opt-out expertise the place you get to decide on who you share your music knowledge with. 

Building a personalised playlist for 2

The algorithm for Blend took a number of iteration by a number of engineers. We spent a variety of time making an attempt to uncover what the best playlist output must be. Creating a consultant playlist turns into very sophisticated once you merge two customers’ listening collectively, as a result of some customers have very appropriate tastes, whereas others differ drastically within the music they take heed to. We had to verify we weren’t simply bettering the playlist expertise for prime compatibility, but in addition accommodating for decrease style matches. 

It takes quite a bit to design a coherent expertise that’s aligned throughout completely different tastes, and construct an algorithm that works properly for everybody. For our group, it was a robust collaboration between design and engineering.

Blending expertise collectively: the collaboration between design and engineering

Design and engineering work very intently collectively at Spotify, particularly within the Personalization mission, the place we concentrate on content material programming. We need to assume by sequencing of tracks, what occurs after they hit play, how the consumer will expertise the order of the playlist, and ensure there’s a holistic and unified movement to all of it. Part of what made the collaboration between design and engineering so sturdy was empathy from each side — having a group of user-centric engineers and technically-minded designers. 

We went by a variety of content material high quality checks to determine what the algorithm’s recipe must be — to search out the suitable steadiness of making a cohesive playlist whereas additionally representing each customers’ tastes precisely. Design and insights facilitated testing about how the listening expertise could possibly be improved, and engineers tweaked the algorithm primarily based on suggestions. We got here collectively as a group to search out alternatives to enhance the expertise.   

We at all times attempt to strike a steadiness between user-centered experiences and buildable designs, and it takes a collaborative effort to find out precisely what that’s. Design can establish the influence and consumer expertise, and engineers can establish the hassle and technical feasibility — put collectively, that’s actually highly effective. When we had been creating shareable knowledge factors for the tales, design introduced concepts backed by consumer analysis, and the engineers would establish whether or not it was a high-effort method. If it was, they’d counsel one thing related that might decrease the hassle immensely. Working collectively like that is how the style match scores and Blend tales got here to be.

​​If you want moving into the finer particulars, try this submit about how our engineers select music in your Blend.

Branding Blend: the ultimate bundle

The branding and packaging are what finally communicated the product to customers and introduced the meant imaginative and prescient of Blend to life. We created an summary and minimal idea of actually “blending” two entities collectively. Our cowl artwork, dropped at life by our Editorial Design group, incorporates a rotating suite of 12 completely different circles mixing collectively. It ties again to our central theme: uniting individuals by music, and celebrating one another in an easy, personalised playlist.

Communal listening will at all times be part of the human expertise, and Blend presents a low-pressure however intimate manner to do this. You can meet up with an outdated buddy or get to know a brand new one, discover new suggestions or rediscover outdated songs from reminiscences you’ve shared collectively. It’s like a easy, real “I’m thinking of you” message — that routinely updates with new tracks every day.

To attempt it out your self, sort “Blend” into the search bar of your Spotify cell app, press the “+” button, and invite a buddy!