Guide to being efficiently annoying by Spotify
Today, I'll explore how Spotify strategically utilizes design and in-depth user insights to intentionally introduce friction points that nudge users towards upgrading to the paid subscription.
Prompt: Turn Spotify as Agent Smith from Matrix. Use Spotify's branding to dress his outfit. He offers you 2 pills- Free and Premium. He's smirking. Instead of code and binary in the background, there are musical notes. Detailed. comic aesthetic
I take no pride in admitting that I’ve never used Spotify Premium. The free plan served me well and I did not mind hearing Jake from Statefarm trying to remind me that he was there for me. The experience was alright until it wasn’t. Spotify very soon started rolling out features that obstructed the seamless music-listening experience and these obstructions were no longer limited to just ads. The free version went through a series of changes which now feel like a carefully curated experience that intends to offer Spotify’s users a measured discomfort. Usable enough to keep them around and annoying enough to push them into buying premium.
You listen to what I let you!
The free model does not allow users to search and play a song. It is smart enough to find the song but sly enough to play the song radio. You are left with a choice to be hopeful and wait until your song gets queued or expend your limited chances to hit the next song. For a brief time, there was a tooltip that popped up in case you hit next consecutively to remind you of your limited chances to do it. I no longer see it now. This experience obstruction, as devious as it is, is a genius underscoring of the fact that they not only understand the attitude and behaviour of its users but also their ability to modulate the obstruction. The user flow is still the same, but the outcome is clipped to annoy users while still offering them peanuts instead of pennies.
Curating confusing conventions
The icons highlighted above are tasked to act nothing like what users want them to do. The plus icon adds the playing song to “Liked Songs” whereas the minus icon hides the song from a playlist. Both actions have an exasperating error prevention accompanied by a momentary visibility of status. This gives the user a teaser of what action got executed without enough information or signifiers to fix/change it.
What do you mean *your* playlist?
All the saved and curated playlists are nothing but a collage with missing pieces and a frame. Users cannot play a specific song from their playlists which are fully mushed together as a radio of that playlist.
Destroyer of DMs
This feature ranks highest in the level of annoyance it induced in me and how much respect I have for the genius minds at Spotify. This tooltip was triggered on Spotify after I’d clicked on a song recommendation in my DMs. The amount of rage and admiration I felt in the same breath was unlike any previous experience in 25 years of my life.
Takeaways!
As product designers our over-arching goal must always be to cater to business while keeping users in mind. Spotify is a great example of how design can influence behaviors that benefit the business. One of the clear means by which Spotify manages to get away with this is because of the “Aesthetic-Usability effect”. The perceived design is immaculate and aesthetically pleasing. The interactions and conventions steer the experience in a different direction so it inherently becomes a subconscious play on users’ psyche.
This is by no means a rant of how annoyed I am with a free feature. It is extremely commendable to see these Dark UX patterns being implemented so efficiently to drive business requirements. The ability to curate an experience to intentionally obstructive clearly reflects the thorough work that the UX researchers and Designers at Spotify do. Count me impressed and a happily converted Premium customer.