Spotify: Mindful Mode

Timeline

November 2024
(Design Sprint: 2 Weeks)

Role

UX Designer

Tools

Figma
Canva

Overview: Context & Challenge

Understanding student-athletes’ experiences outside the field is important in supporting mental health awareness and providing support systems around wellness strategies. Student-athletes experience a mix of emotions especially ones of nervousness and excitment before, during, and after a competition.

Student-athletes often listen to music in preparation for a game. In fact, music can serve a range of emotional support by serving as motivation or even a distraction.

This project was part of a university course focused on exploring technologies for mental health. Working in pairs, I collaborated with a student-athlete and asked:

How might we support student athletes to positively manage their emotions around a competition?

Competitor Analysis & Current Platform Analysis

Here are some of the brief considerations we made in the process based on the users we spoke with.

Why Spotify?

Widely Used for Different Scenarios: Spotify is already a popular platform for personal use, especially during competition season, with student-athletes using both curated playlists and Spotify’s generated playlists for scenarios like working out, studying, and other.
Integrated Music and Podcasts: Spotify seamlessly combines music and podcasts, providing a well-rounded listening experience to meet diverse needs.
Collaborative Features: The platform enables users to create collaborative playlists, allowing for both manually curated selections and automated suggestions, fostering a sense of community and personalization.
Flexible Payment Plans: With both free and premium options, Spotify is accessible to a wide audience. This feature could encourage free users to upgrade while enhancing the experience for existing premium users.

Current Platform Analysis: Spotify's current genre breakdown for distinct categories like ‘Mood’ and 'Wellness'—less of a genre and more of a category that captures various emotional states, resulting in what might seem to some like random wellness playlists.

Opportunity
Optimize Spotify’s current platform to improve personalization around wellness by integrating users’ music preferences rather than compiling random wellness playlists.

User Research Insights

We interviewed five student-athletes for our project and learned the following...

Key Insights:
🎧 Personalization should remain effortless and not create additional burdens for users
🎧 Expanding the feature's usability beyond student-athletes would add broader value
🎧 Integrating reminders and syncing them with schedules would encourage consistent engagement with the app

Opportunity
Spotify can foster listening communities within people of similiar goals.

Introducing Spotify: Mindful Mode

Our redesign focused on the student-athlete's experience preparing for a game, though it can also apply to a broader audience.

Prototyping & Final Design

What is Mindful Mode? Mindful Mode combines a mix of Spotify’s suggestions and users’ preferences that might better align with their mental health needs, such as needing a boost of motivation. Users receive a personalized page after answering some questions (described further in “What are the main features?”).

How does it work? Users can switch between “Regular” Spotify to “Mindful Spotify” through a toggle switch on the top of the screen.

This interface flow designed for a student-athlete preparing for their next competition.

What are the main features? Through our main redesign, users can customize their experience through two methods: by completing a Check-in or by answering questions under What’s Your Role?

Through a Check-in, individuals have the option to answer more general questions including questions like What is the activity you need music or podcasts for today? Meanwhile, What’s Your Role? allows users to answer questions more particular to their experiences.

More Personalization? Yes! We heard users express the need for personalization that aligned with their routines, in which we brainstormed for two new features in the redesign.

Sync your calendar

This feature give users the option to sync their calendars to automate reminders and song recommendations such as the one showed when switching from Regular Spotify to Mindful Mode. This would remove a potential barrier that Check-in may pose if users do not always have the time to input all their preferences.

Create groups

This feature would reflect the team spirit of sports teams through a collaborative curation of the listening experience. Rather than simply listening to the same tracks, individuals could focus on curating other team members’ listening experiences too, which can ultimately play a factor in their performance as they might feel more supported by their teammates given that they feel as if they are being thought of.

While these considerations came after our initial design, further conversations with users and user testing might better inform a better thought-out design of these specific features.

Ethical Considerations

User Experience &
User Privacy
Since Spotify’s goal is not to directly address mental health crises, we focus on questions like what kind of music users want to listen to rather than directly asking how they feel. To avoid burdening users, the frequency and depth of questionnaires are entirely up to their discretion, ensuring they can still enjoy a personalized experience regardless of how much they engage.

As a mental health-inspired feature enhancing individuals’ listening experiences, our ethical considerations also underscore the importance of this technology, one that combines personalization and informed use.

Reflection

⭐️ Spotify: Mindful Mode was designated first place among our class design projects, recognized for its clear focus on the challenge, integration of user feedback to shape the concept, and attention to ethical considerations.

⭐️ This project was one of the fastest yet most robust I have completed. My previous coursework and projects have helped me streamline the design process, allowing me to focus more on conducting meaningful and impactful user testing.

👩🏽‍💻 Given our limited timeframe to complete this project, we prioritized creating an initial prototype by first reviewing research studies, discussing my teammate’s experiences as a student-athlete, and conducting initial user interviews. With the prototype in place, we revisited previous interviewees and engaged new participants to gather user feedback. Additionally, we also consulted with our faculty to ensure the design prioritized both a positive user experience and ethical considerations, an aspect I always strive to consider in my work but was newer to me in a formal design process!

👩🏽‍💻 In a future version, we would develop a prototype of what using the redesign for a full day looks like, what syncing Spotify and a calendar looks like, and what engaging with communities with similar goals, like in sport teams, looks like. For now, our current iteration starts the process of prioritizing mental health by identifying how user preferences around environmental factors contribute to a specific mood.