Design Sprint: Gamifying Spotify
Wake up, babe, new Design Sprint just dropped!
And, this time, it’s a Design Sprint in less than two hours! What’s the goal? The gamification of an app that young people, like gen Z and millennials, use in our daily lives to make it more addictive.
“We live in a society that devalues the ideal of self-denial by systematically stimulating immediate desires”, Gilles Lipovetsky (Le Crépuscule du devoir, 2006)
In other words, young people want to achieve their goals quickly and, if they don’t, they lose interest. We’ve seen this on Tiktok, for example, the social media app most used by the new generations, which allows you to change the video if the one you’re watching isn’t interesting during its first ten seconds. We no longer have patience: we want it all, and we want it now.
The app: Spotify
Our team decided to gamify Spotify, the most widely used music app by young people. Why? Because we would start from a consolidated network of users, from a very attractive concept such as music, and because we believed that we could add new features that would make this great product even better.
How do you gamify?
Gamification has five main elements, which will be necessary to successfully achieve our objective:
- Goals: users must know what their objective is.
- Rules: users must be clear about how to achieve that goal.
- Feedback: users must get an immediate response to their performance.
- Rewards: positive stimuli must arrive as soon as the goal is achieved, to generate addiction.
- Motivation: for added value, there must be an extra motivation (learning, sharing, etc.)
Ideation: Crazy 8
First of all, the team made a quick brainstorming, using the Crazy 8 method. How does it work? Each member spends eight minutes developing several ideas individually, spending a maximum of one minute per idea. So, in less than ten minutes, in a team of three people we had 24 ideas. Not all of them useful, of course, but some very good ones, including our final solution.
Our solution
We decided that, since Spotify already has an annual event where it offers statistics on the music that each user listens to, and since many people share what they like on their social networks, our goal was to introduce gamified recommendations to Spotify.
How does it work? Sara receives a notification inviting her to participate in the recommendation game. Spotify shows her some data about Elena’s tastes, whom she doesn’t know at all but with whom she shares some artists, and based solely on her statistics, Sara must recommend her a song.
When Elena listens to the song, she will be able to rate Sara as a recommending user, giving her a score in a global ranking. Users with high positions in this ranking will receive a free monthly subscription to the application as a reward.
Design
Replicating the existing design of the Spotify app, we created the screens necessary to carry out the gamification in Figma. The interfaces are in Spanish because the whole project was developed in Spanish.
This would be Sara’s interface, who is about to recommend a song to Elena:
Elena’s (or any user who receives a recommendation) interface would look like this:
And this is how the rankings and screens for those who receive feedback on their recommendation would be displayed:
Testing
No project, even if it takes 2 hours, should be left without testing. That’s why we discussed this improvement with some Spotify users. We received several interesting ideas that we decided to include from this feedback:
- The subscription reward should be monthly, not annual, to encourage continued participation.
- It would be interesting if artists participated in the game of recommendations.
- Negative rankings could also be fun, highlighting the people who recommend the worst or the songs that are the worst recommended.
Overall, the feedback was very good. All users expressed interest and said they would participate in our gamification, so we definitely consider this project a resounding success.
