7 Key Insights To Build Better Products From Spotify Ep.2
📚 Key Insights Library
by Growth.Design Inc.
Visual Hierarchy
When you have multiple elements on a page, give extra weight to the most important action.
Visual hierarchy can be accomplished in a variety of ways, playing with: scale, contrast, proximity, typography, grids, textures, etc. as long as your most important message gets the focal point of attention.
Insight 1 of 7
To use this principle, start by figuring out what's the most crucial piece of info. Then simply use the techniques mentioned above to make it stand out. Easier said than done, but that's what people refer to when they tell you: "Make it pop!". It's just another way of saying that your visual hierarchy should bring more focus to the main element.
Negativity Bias
We have a greater recall of the unpleasant over the positive.
Insight 2 of 7
Studies confirmed that the reason we have this bias is caused by negative events being much rarer than more positive outcomes. As a result, we are expecting positive events, therefore become more attentive of any negative situations that may arise*.
A quote by the author of Thinking fast and slow:
The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. By shaving a few hundredths of a second from the time needed to detect a predator, this circuit improves the animal’s odds of living long enough to reproduce.
*Lewick et al., 1992; Peeters, 1971, 1989; Peeters & Czapinski, 1990
Social Proofing
We tend to follow the patterns of others in new or unfamiliar situations.
Insight 3 of 7
New research* has found that when we’re deciding between products but aren’t well-informed, observing others’ choices significantly influences our own decision. This leads to the creation of a powerful social default choice.
*Eun Huh, Vosgerau & Morewedge (2014)
According to the research, it would appear that the effect works best in industries where the choice is high, but our knowledge is relatively low. We just witness this phenomenon in the podcast industry generating thousands of news shows every week that we don't know about!
Podcast Backlinks
Increasing discoverability for creators to reach new audiences more efficiently.
Insight 4 of 7
☔️ Problem: Discovery is one of the core challenges for the podcast industry. Thousands of new shows are created every week, yet only a handful are popular. How can Spotify reverse this?
💡 Potential Solution: Giving the ability to link to other podcasts or give creators control over suggested podcasts at the end of the show. That would allow new creators to reach more specific audience organically.
⚙️ Success Metric for this experiment: Number of new shows watched/week by user
Signifiers
The goal of a signifier is to illustrate what the object can do before you interact with it.
Insight 5 of 7
Signifiers are a dying breed, unfortunately.
At some point, we started to ignore good design practices to gain aesthetic or quickly solve complex problems without thinking about the user.
Swipe up, down, long-press this, pinch that... Without any ways of knowing beforehand unless you make a happy mistake or someone tells you to...
Simple Question: Can you guess what it does before interacting with it?
Talk To Real People
The truth is always outside of the building. Spreadsheets don't question your decisions, but people do.
Insight 6 of 7
You believe you know your product by heart because you've created it. You look at the numbers once in a while and you believe you're doing good. However, for some reason, you're not achieving the growth you were expecting...
One reason could be because you're disconnected from what day to day users are experiencing: What are they struggling with? What's top of mind for them right now? What do they want to achieve?
The best way to find the answers is to pick up the phone or sit down with your users every week. The amount of learnings will surpass your time invested.
Create An Investment Loop
Let users create content on the platform to unlock new opportunities to re-engage them in creative ways.
Insight 7 of 7
☔️ Problem: It's easy for a podcast listener to jump from one app to another if the features and experience are better. You only need to subscribe to your favorite podcasts and everything is good!
💡 Potential Solution: Giving a way to users to commit to the app by adding all their podcast notes within. That way, if you switch to another app, you are losing valuable data. Plus, you can make the experience of digesting notes an engaging one, benefiting the user.
⚙️ Success Metric for this experiment: user retention