Reflection Point: Usability, Accessibility, Ethics

Note: This is written as part of Designlab’s UX Academy, as part of a lesson on usability.

Spotify transformed music listening forever when it launched in 2008. Today, Spotify is the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service with 345m users, including 155m subscribers, across 170 markets. #

Usability

Spotify has an incredibly clean, easy-to-navigate application. For the bottom navigation bar, you have the options of Home, Search, or Your Library. This makes listening and finding music super effective. On your home page, you’re given the six most listened to items, followed by a list of recently played albums/playlists and then an array of music that Spotify has curated for you. This simplistic design makes learnability easy and memorable. The search function is great. Not only are you offered a search bar at the top of the page but Spotify also includes users' top listened to genres, popular podcast categories, and “moods”. If the user is just looking for “pop” music or music for a dinner party, this prevents the user from having to take the extra step of typing in the search bar. Finally, in your library, you are given a list of your playlists, artists, albums, and a search bar, all neatly organized for easy access.

Accessibility

As for accessibility, Spotify does a wonderful job. It utilizes three main colors for its application: black, white, and green. The contrast and text size cater to most visually impaired folks. Although not providing the user an option to change the background color could be troublesome for the visually-impaired, as some may prefer to read with black text on white background. That being said, according to AppleVis, Spotify is a “community-powered website for blind and low-vision users,” and the app is very accessible and very VoiceOver friendly by offering voice command, Bluetooth, and ‘Car mode’. This makes it an even more convenient experience for those who need to be “hands-free”.

Ethics

Although there are some issues with artist revenue on Spotify and difficulties closing a user’s account (they must go through customer service first), Spotify’s ethics are overall quite good. According to Spotify’s Code of Conduct, they base their policies and values on being innovative, collaborative, sincere, passionate, and playful. Their three main rules are:

1. Do the right thing. Always act with honesty, integrity, and reliability. Keep moral and ethical standards sky-high.
2. Be nice. Treat people with dignity and respect, regardless of who they are and where they came from. Stay decent and courteous in all relationships.
3. Play fair. Don’t cheat. Be careful to balance the interests of all groups (stakeholders, artists, users, employees, and the general public) when you go about our business.