Audio-Forward UX: Meeting Listeners Where They Are

People can take heed to Spotify nearly wherever, anytime, on any gadget, and for many people, it’s an all-day companion. As designers and researchers at Spotify, our problem is to embrace an “audio-forward” strategy in an effort to craft a person expertise that spans contexts, conditions, and environments. 

We’re going to interrupt down what which means for us by introducing you to the idea of “audio-forward” UX, focus on a framework we’ve created to assist us grapple with the distinctive realities of how individuals use our service, and supply a take a look at a few tasks which might be designed to bridge contexts and supply worth, utility, and delight to listeners, whether or not they’re trying on the app or not.

Spotify, our fixed companion

The means individuals use Spotify, in comparison with different apps, is exclusive. Our service may be loved throughout a wide range of units—some with screens, some with out—in addition to throughout a wide range of moments, conditions, and contexts. Though bigger developments exist throughout completely different personas, a listener’s day with Spotify may span various distinctive mixtures of those variables.

They may begin preparing for the day whereas listening to considered one of their Daily Mixes on a wise speaker. With the cellular app of their pocket, they’re going to commute to work whereas listening to Your Daily Drive. They’ll choose up the place they left off on the desktop app whereas plugging away at their day’s work. On the best way dwelling, they’ll swap again to the cellular app and compensate for this week’s Discover Weekly. Before even ending unlocking the entrance door, they’ve already beamed Spotify to their tv, blanketing the lounge in stress-free tunes as they drop onto the sofa to unwind after an extended day.

Spotify is a multimodal expertise that is not outlined or constrained by the bounds of a smartphone display. It adjustments, evolves, and adapts to our particular person, distinctive wants.

Audio-forward person expertise 

Whenever we take up new challenges at Spotify we’ve to contemplate this context-spanning actuality. It merely is not sufficient to open Sketch and assault new issues from a visual-only perspective. Product alternatives are sometimes layered and multifaceted, and require new approaches. As designers at Spotify, our major issues are guaranteeing easy transitions between interacting with the app and consuming content material, in addition to offering worth throughout contexts.

One means we do that is by utilizing a framework that we name Modes, which encapsulates the 4 main states that our listeners cycle by as they use our service: Interact, Leave, Consume, and Return. When paired with our personas, Modes are a strong device that ensures the person experiences we create contemplate the larger image, and that we’re capable of meet individuals wherever they’re. 

Modes is the end result of a number of years price of in-depth person analysis round understanding psychological fashions on the intersection of audio and person expertise. 

Before we leap into the analysis behind the framework, let’s discover what makes researching audio experiences distinctive.

User analysis for audio experiences

User analysis in an audio-forward world poses an fascinating problem. Unlike different sorts of person analysis, we will’t simply convey contributors right into a lab, hand them a tool, and immediate them to undergo a stream. Audio experiences don’t work that means, as a result of audio is a core attribute of our surroundings. Audio may be the main focus of an immersive exercise, like a live performance or a dance get together, or a background aspect, like whenever you’re learning or cooking. As researchers, we have to enterprise into the listener’s world in a non-intrusive option to perceive how audio impacts them and, in flip, how they work together with audio. 

To construct out the Modes framework, we would have liked to take this naturalistic in-context analysis to the following degree. 

Uncovering the Modes framework by exploratory person analysis

We had been most interested by how listeners work together with Spotify whereas they’re listening throughout contexts, like learning, cooking, exercising, or commuting. What attracts individuals again to the app? What prevents listeners from interacting? While “let’s seek to understand how people interact with technology across different environments” might sound like a typical analysis goal, we had been centered on observing the smallest particulars, the trivia, of every interplay. 

This analysis required a extremely naturalistic setup. As the Hawthorne impact explains, hovering over individuals’s shoulders to look at what they’re doing would possible affect their habits in unnatural methods, thus compromising the analysis. We determined that eye-tracking can be probably the most observational and non-intrusive methodology. 

The eye-tracking glasses used on this analysis look loads like regular studying eyeglasses, however they’re geared up with a number of small cameras: one on the bridge of the nostril, that captures the view in entrance of the participant, and one in every lens, capturing what their eyes are specializing in. Despite being laden with expertise, it seems like sporting an odd pair of eyeglasses, offering freedom of motion and the power to go about every day actions with ease.

We set our contributors up with these glasses and allow them to go about their every day lives, giving us a window into what it’s prefer to take heed to Spotify in a wide range of eventualities fairly actually from their perspective. We noticed a wide range of environments—from commuting on a crowded New York City subway, to learning for a calculus examination within the library, to baking cupcakes at dwelling. We collected a treasure trove of consideration information about what they had been specializing in and the way Spotify slot in.

From this observational eye-tracking information, we gained an understanding of each the transient and the intentional interactions individuals take inside the app. We witnessed the lengthy intervals of time when listeners had been actively listening to music whereas immersed in a wide range of actions, like listening to hip hop whereas working on the treadmill. We obtained a way of the trouble required to pause these actions to return to the app and make an adjustment or take some type of motion, like washing off flour and cake batter earlier than grabbing the telephone to skip a track.  

Mixing strategies for richer insights

Building off of the observational information, we performed follow-up interviews with the contributors to know their attitudes in the direction of the expertise. In these subsequent interviews, we performed again this eye-tracking footage and requested the contributors to elucidate their motivations for and boundaries to interacting. We gained wealthy insights about their sentiment in the direction of the expertise, in addition to how conditions and surrounding environments formed their interactions with Spotify

In partnership with Data Science, we sized the behaviors we noticed on this analysis. We quantified how lengthy individuals spent instantly interacting with the app versus listening whereas partaking in different actions, in addition to how usually they transfer between these modes in a given listening session.

We synthesized these blended strategies insights into the Modes framework, which particulars the 4 main states listeners cycle by as they use Spotify: Interact, Leave, Consume, Return. Interact contains these moments of interacting instantly with the visible UI. Listeners are within the Leave mode after they put the gadget down and concentrate on one other exercise. They enter Consume, actively listening to content material on Spotify whereas immersed in that exercise. Finally, Return includes triggers that convey them again into the app. 

Designing audio-forward, in apply

Let’s discover two current function launches that take these completely different modes under consideration to fulfill listeners the place they’re.

Canvas

Canvas (a function presently in beta) is an 8-second looping visible that artists can add to any of their tracks. It seems within the Now Playing View, rather than the album paintings. This expertise helps artists join with their listeners by enabling inventive expression past audio. 

“If you go back in time and think about how people engaged with music at a record store, you either knew what you wanted, or you were grabbed by a visual. ‘Oh, what’s this?’” stated Barton Smith, Associate Principal Designer on Spotify’s Creator workforce. “It gives consumers a richer sense of the music they’re listening to in ways that they weren’t able to feel before. I hear the lyrics, I feel the melody, but what world does this music exist in? It’s a chance for artists to paint their universe or communicate a message they’re trying to send.”

Canvas champions how individuals already use Spotify – capturing listeners within the Interact mode. “We wanted to design within those existing behaviors; the moments where listeners pull their phone out for just a few seconds. We find that people are sticking around a little bit longer to take in those visuals and connect with the artist.” 

Giving creators the power to bridge audio and visible areas in an effort to captivate listeners has constructive downstream results. “Canvas is building more connections. Artists are slotting into what is typically a more passive, automatic task like ‘heart-ing’ or skipping songs. Now people are pausing, thinking ‘wow, that looks really cool, that resonates with me, maybe I should check out their other music. They sound good, and I connect to their visuals,’” resulting in extra engagement with their presence on Spotify, and off. 

Voice-Enabled Ads & Promotions

While Barton and the Creator workforce bridge audio to visible with Canvas, the Ad Experience workforce is concentrated on unlocking engagement with audio advertisements and promotions, audio-forward codecs you would beforehand solely work together with by the visible UI.

Voice-Enabled Ads, which we’re testing on the Spotify free tier at the moment, are audio advertisements that allow listeners to vocalize a command in an effort to take motion. This expertise helps manufacturers and creators join with listeners in moments when their context, state of affairs, or surroundings may current boundaries to engagement.

With audio advertisements at the moment, listeners have round 30 seconds to pause their exercise, discover the telephone, unlock it, open Spotify, and take some type of motion – like clicking by. With voice, we wished to make it faster and simpler for listeners to interact with related advertisements and promoted content material on Spotify, even when they’re within the Consume mode. 

“If listeners are looking at the app on their phone and want to interact with something, usually the results are immediate. We wanted to extend that immediacy to voice and deliver instant value through audio,” stated Ashley Hopkins, Senior Product Designer on the Ad Experience workforce.

In this primary iteration of Voice-Enabled Ads, Ashley and the workforce had been very intentional with the capabilities of the format in an effort to present that quick worth whereas telephones are out of sight. To do this, they centered on selling content material, together with each music and podcasts, that we have already got on our service. “To keep scope in check, we focused on a Play Now intent. It makes a ton of sense for Spotify as an audio-first platform. Whether you’re listening to music or podcasts, playback intents span many of our use cases.”

Ultimately, Ashley and her workforce contemplate voice to be an optimization of a format that also must span a number of modes. “We have a principle of ‘voice-forward, not voice-only.’ You should be able to complete the same task equally through visual or voice UIs. At the same time, while the visual UI compliments and emphasizes voice interactions, you can still tap to interact instead of using your voice. We aren’t forcing you to interact in a specific way.”

Ashley and Barton have deliberately approached their design course of by contemplating the larger, broader image. How may we ship delight and foster interactions by bridging modes? Both of those options are including wealthy, multimodal capabilities to Spotify. 

In abstract

We’re unlocking new avenues of creativity as we proceed to equip ourselves with a higher foundational understanding of how Spotify and audio match into individuals’s lives. We’ve begun to discover new interplay fashions and design new experiences that bridge Interact and Consume. We’re methods of delivering instantaneous, in-the-moment, hands-and-eyes-free worth with techniques like voice interplay. We’re exploring methods to provide artists highly effective new instruments to specific their music visually, serving to to foster priceless new connections with their listeners. We’re on a mission to create an unbelievable Spotify expertise that meets listeners the place they’re, offering delight or enabling pure interactions it doesn’t matter what they’re doing.

There’s a lot extra unbelievable work occurring behind the scenes, and we’re actually enthusiastic about what the long run holds.