Thandiwe Tembo

02 | OPPORTUNITY STATEMENT

Spotify’s Mission: to unlock the potential of human creativity—by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it.

With over 80 million tracks on Spotify, the process of finding new music and curating a personalized playlist can be over whelming to users. There is an opportunity to provide users with an algorithmically curated playlist based on unexplored properties.

03 | SOLUTION

Inspired by popular web apps like Discover Quickly, MusicScapes, and Receiptify, TUUN created a web application in which users could take a quiz to map their music to color associations, create a custom color palette and receive a playlist based on the color mapping and color palette. A product like this not only helps further explore the psychological connections between color and music but could also be used to aid lighting design for live events, partnerships with smart light bulbs/ companies, and more.

04 | DISCOVER & SYNTHESIZE

The discovery phase of developing a this product had 3 elements:
Research, Survey, and a Competitive Analysis.

We initially theorize that there is a unique association people have between music and color and emotion might be a connector for that association. In analyzing the results of our research, we not only validated that building an experience around color, music, and emotion would result in a personalized experience & playlists but also that there was a substantial number of possible users, a space for it in the music experience market.

Research

Spotify

The music platform of choice was Spotify because they have the largest portion of the global music streaming market at 31% with 365 million monthly active users according to their Q2 2021 report.

Music, Color, Emotion

We decided to design the experience around the color. We suspected people's taste and connection to music are not fully universal and unique to the individual. Additionally, we know that music can evoke certain emotions and wanted to use emotion as the middleman between music and color because color can also evoke and relate to emotions. All songs on Spotify are given a “valence” metric or a metric that describes “the musical positiveness conveyed by a track” and this would be the metric used to make the emotion link.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis was done to understand how new experiences were being created using Spotify. We saw that there were tons of products that created custom playlists based on one Spotify library and products that specifically used color and emotion to do that but none that used both music and color indicating a possible space in the market for our product.

Survey

The goal was to see:

↳ How do people associate music with color (and is emotion a connecter between the two)?

↳ Are those associations unique or universal?

↳ Can these connections be used to produce a novel music discovery experience?

Our most notable findings were:

↳ Users associated certain colors with certain moods/emotions and those connections were often related to culture, childhood, experiences, memories, or a certain mood/vibe

↳Users connected the same artist to different colors & same the color to artists in genres, suggesting a possibility of unique or personalized color-music associations

05 | IDEATION & ITERATION

Our ideation and interactions phase confirmed that we wanted to focus on a mobile-first design process because most users use Spotify and other potentially related applications like Instagram on their mobile devices. Additionally, we conducted several rounds of group design critiques, user testing, and user presentations and feedback sessions leading up to our final product.

06 | FINAL PRODUCT

The final site consisted of the calibration section and playlist section of the experience. Users would take the calibration quiz to map their music-color associations, then create a color palette(s) and would produce a custom playlist

Due to time constraints, only the main calibration portion of the experience was extensively tested, however, future testing would include:

↳ Test the overall experience with a broader demographic of users and collect user data for the analysis portion of the site

↳ Design and develop the music-color data analysis section of the site

↳ Testing with people who do experience color blindness and synesthesia

07 | REFLECTION

My biggest takeaway from this project was that it was great exposure to working with established design systems and guidelines. While we did establish our branding for TUUN, because we were working with Spotify's API, we needed to diligently adhere to their design guidelines. It was a good exercise in working with developers and creating a product from concept to launch. Additionally, because we were establishing a new product, it provided an opportunity to explore what possible applications, profit opportunities, and measures of impact the product could have.

MEASURING IMPACT & PROFIT OPPORTUNITIES

↳ Use a user satisfaction survey to gauge overall response to the experience

↳ Tracking palette-playlist creations and palette-playlist saves to see if people are coming back to the experience

↳ Given that people are repeat users of the experience, place certain palette-playlist creation features behind a paywall (only 3 free playlists and pay to create more)

↳ Use the data collected from the experience and the information from analyzing users' color-music connections and trends to make data-driven lighting design decisions for physical experiences (concerts, bar/clubs, interactive experience/installations)

06 | THANKS TEAM!

Anna L. | Back End Developer & Technology Researcher
Eric K. | Dev-ops, Full Stack Developer & Technology Researcher
Gabby B. | Front End Developer & Technology Researcher
Brandon Y. | UI/UX Designer, UX Researcher & Branding Lead
David F. | UI/UX Designer & UX Researcher
Nikki M. | UI/UX Designer & UX Researcher
Thandiwe Tembo | UI/UX Designer & UX Research Lead

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