Usability Audit
Context
This was a self-directed project completed in 2021. Spotify is a music-streaming app that allows its users to curate their own playlists. I hypothesized that removing a song from a Spotify playlist was more difficult than it needed to be in the Android app. My goal was to identify how extensive this issue was and to introduce a solution as early as possible into the user’s journey.
Deliverables
User Flows
Pain-Point Solutions
Hybridizing for Better Understanding
Due to the narrow focus of my audit I chose to map out every action a user might take in trying to accomplish her objective (removing a song from her playlist). The end result was a hybrid of a user-flow and journey-map that allowed me to both see the specifics of where the interface was failing and how the user might feel at each stage.
Discovery
I found that the user has to go through a least four steps to access the action of removing a song from a playlist she’s currently listening to, and that’s if she doesn’t come to complete dead-ends, which is the result of two journeys. There is no reason such a basic action should be so obscured.
Pruning Frustration
How close to the user’s first action could I give her access to the action she desires? Using the visualization provided by my user-flow I identified the first two pages (post lock-screen) as good areas to integrate solutions without requiring a big overhaul of the UI.
Icon Shortcuts
One solution was to use the empty space next to extant icons on the “now playing” slider menu to add utility. Icons for Add to Playlist and Remove from Playlist fit nicely alongside Share with room left over for a History button which could be useful to the user in identifying songs they may wish to interact with.
More Options
The option to Remove from Playlist could also be easily inserted into the More Options menu for Now Playing. Here I’ve replaced Add to Queue, but all possible tasks for a song could remain available in this menu.
The Results
A Happy Journey
With the small changes I’ve made, my user’s journey is now much shorter and provides multiple pathways for the user to access the desired action should the user miss the icon in the first card.