Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Emin Inanc Unlu

An exploration of how to make music discovery faster and easier.

I love listening music and I’m a big fan of Spotify since 2012. I enjoy discovering music and I’m constantly on the hunt for new songs.

Spotify has some really useful features for music discovery, like “user playlists” and “discover weekly”. But, I believe we can make it a lot better until artificial intelligence gets really smart and predict our next favorite tracks almost perfectly based on our listening history, behaviors and psychology.

On this topic, I have been thinking of some ideas for a while and decided to make a fully functional prototype to test them out.

Smart Play: Accelerated Music Discovery Mode

Smart play is a mode that you can customize and activate when you want to discover music easily and actively. There are two main features in this mode:

Play only the most popular part of the songs.
Skip repeating songs.

The idea is simple. If you want to discover music more efficiently, just listen to the most popular parts of the songs and skip the ones you listened before. It’s highly possible that you will like a song if you like the best part of it.

Bonus Tip: You can skip repeating songs or explicit songs with Denied App. I have been using it for a while and it’s really useful while exploring playlists.

See It in Action

<a href="https://medium.com/media/5aca025da08b1d6d131cff4f3edf9a15/href">https://medium.com/media/5aca025da08b1d6d131cff4f3edf9a15/href</a>

Try the Interactive Prototype Yourself!

It’s an interactive prototype. So, you can try it in most of the modern browsers by clicking the link below — better if you use Safari or Chrome.

Usage tips: If fonts look weird, try to reload the page. Depending on your internet connection, it might take time to start playing music tracks. Also, I distorted most parts of the songs in the prototype to prevent any illegal use or copy, so don’t worry, your speaker isn’t broken!

For developers and designers: If you’re familiar with Framer, you can download the project file and play with it locally.

Legal Notice: I used the songs in the video and prototype for only exploratory purpose under “fair use” of copyrighted material. I distorted most parts of the songs in the prototype to prevent any illegal use or copy. Please let me know if any of these still violates copyrights or doesn’t count as fair use, and I will delete the related content.

Detecting the Most Popular Parts

I chose the time ranges of popular parts in the prototype according to my own taste and a little randomly without using any statistical data. However, Spotify should be able to detect these ranges automatically with the data they have been gathering from the users. Also, AI could be helpful in detecting the transition moments in the songs to make the experience even more smoother.

Possible Additions

I think the next add-on for this mode could be smart playing according to genre or mood. For example, if I’m working and if I need to focus, I could activate this mood filter easily without the need of creating another playlist.

Another feature could be creating a playlist trailer based on the most popular songs in the playlist with the most popular parts of them. In this way, it could be easier to decide which playlists to listen when you have a lot of options.

The Playlist

If you liked the songs, here the full list of my curated instrumental collection. You can follow the playlist to stay up-to-date!

<a href="https://medium.com/media/c06893ca7d7097ef4f0ebad055077b5b/href">https://medium.com/media/c06893ca7d7097ef4f0ebad055077b5b/href</a>

Conclusion

It was so much fun to work on this project and I learned a lot while doing it. I’m mostly happy with the result, but obviously, it needs testing with real users and data to see if it’s working as expected or not. More iterations would make it better for sure!

✨ ⭐ ✨ By the way, I’m currently looking for a job as a product designer. Hit me up if you’re interested in and let’s have a talk! 🌎 🌍 🌏 ✨ ⭐️ ✨

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

Spotify Smart Play — A Case Study was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Spotify Smart Play — A Case Study

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