Patterns & Flows: Spotify
Background, User Flow, and Patterns
Background
Just about every morning, after I feed my son, I do a quick round on household chores. Dishes, gathering trash, sweeping…and what makes it enjoyable is that I get to have my “podcast time”. With one earbud in, I open my Spotify app and my “recently played” pops up. I tap Crime Junkies and just like that, I am picking up where I left off on another murder mystery episode. Spotify is one of those apps that I did not really appreciate until I started my journey into UX. Now when I look at Spotify’s UI, I appreciate the ease of endless browsability, the clean, consistent design, and its anticipation of my needs/wants. And because of this, Spotify has been integrated into my daily life.
User Flow
Patterns
Auto Suggestion- When I first enter into the app, I am shown content that I have “Recently Played”. This helps the user quickly find what I am looking for without having to use the search feature.
Carousels- If you have ever used Spotify, then you know they are notorious for using carousels. They use carousels to group similar content together for the user to scroll through. This helps makes use of the real estate on the page.
Status Trackers - Similar to a progress bar, Spotify uses status trackers to lets users track where they are at in a song or podcast. Not only does it give the user a time frame of how long a song or podcast will be but it also is interactive. A user can simply scroll the tracker back or forth to either rewind or fast-forward a song.
Bottom Navigation Bar- Since Spotify is primarily used on mobile-it completely makes sense why they incorporated a bottom navbar. This allows users to navigate to three popular destinations on the app; home, search, and your library. When a user clicks on one of these destinations, home, for example, the icon fills in white and becomes emphasized through higher contrast. Letting the user know that they are currently on the home screen.
Summary
Spotify's ability to use these design patterns to deliver a design that is easy to navigate, learn and use is the exact reason why design patterns are so important! They help deliver a solid user experience and keep users, like me, coming back daily for more.
