Spotify: Usability, Accessibility, and Ethics
Spotify is a platform that has become part of my daily routine. I use it to listen to music when I get ready in the morning. It’s an absolute must on my commute to work. It even helps me fall asleep at night. Over the years, Spotify has continued to evolve to satisfy its users and help them discover more music. I wanted to take a look into Spotify’s usability, accessibility, and ethics to further analyze what the platform does and does not do well.
Usability
(Using a few of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics)
Visibility of System Status: One of the best ways that Spotify does this is by making it clear whether or not a song is able to be played or not. They do this in a few ways. If there is not internet connection, then the entire list of songs will be grayed out so that it cannot be selected. They also have a banner at the bottom that says “Spotify is offline.” On top of that, they have a “No internet connection. Go online and try again.” displayed on the main screen.
Match Between System and Real World: As a music platform, Spotify’s interface translates well into the real world in that the music slider takes you into a different place in the song depending on which way you move it. I also like that you can play the song on a different speaker, so if you’re listening on your phone, you can select to play it on your Living Room Alexa, and it will immediately begin playing on that device.
User Control and Freedom: There have been time where I accidentally swipe left on a song in my playlist and end up deleting it. While it does tell me that I’ve removed a song from my liked songs, it doesn’t tell me which song nor does it let me undo it. This leaves me frustrated at times because I don’t know which song I am now missing from my playlist, and I can’t easily undo it without manually searching the song and adding it back in.
Consistency and Standards: Spotify is very consistent with their font, spacing, typography, and especially with the visual elements of their app such as playlist covers. Whenever they curate their own playlist, they have a very uniform, clean aesthetic in terms of how they create the art for the front display. Therefore, the user is usually able to easily identify when Spotify has curated a playlist versus when a user has created one.
Recognition Rather than Recall: Sometimes I have trouble remembering the exact name or spelling of the artist or song I’m looking for, but I like how Spotify has suggestions while I’m typing into the search. It also helps correct me if I spelled the word wrong, and usually searches for the correct artist or song I’m looking for as long as I’m not too far off.
Flexibility and Efficiency of Use: Spotify provides flexibility to its users in by providing multiple ways to add a liked song, to view an artist’s page, to delete a song, and to add to the queue, just to name a few. You can either click the ellipses menu to manually tap the option for these actions, or you can do various shortcuts such as tapping a heart icon to like, tapping on the artist name on the song itself to get to the artist page, swiping left to delete a song from a playlist, and swiping right to add to queue.
Aesthetic and Minimal Design: Spotify has a great minimal design by not over-cluttering their screen with unnecessary information. The user sees exactly what they need to see in a visually appealing way. The platform features a black background, which is easy on the eyes, and white and gray fonts. This also makes the album art stand out as the element of color on the page.
Help and Documentation: I think it’s really great that Spotify labels their bottom navigation menu items instead of expecting users to rely solely on identifying the icons. They also have a great onboarding process, in which they ask the user to identify some artists that they enjoy listening to and curate playlists for them on the spot.
Accessibility
Spotify seems to care a lot about inclusivity and accessibility when it comes to their platform and design. They’ve released articles about added features to aid with accessibility and Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
On top of their great text color contrast, they’ve also added the ability to increase the text size on the app. They also have added the feature of auto-created transcripts for podcasts, so users with hearing impairments can still enjoy the content.
Something I think they could improve on is adding lyrics to a larger majority of their songs because currently it’s only available through Genius, and I’ve only seen it on a select few of very popular songs. Adding lyrics would again help those who are potentially deaf or hard of hearing, while also being useful to regular users.
Ethics
Dark patterns. Have you heard of them? They’re tactics used by companies to trick their users through the design of the platform, and almost every company uses at least a few, including Spotify.
The biggest issue that users have with Spotify is cancelling a subscription. Spotify makes it rather difficult for a user to even find where this option is, and once they do find it, apparently users used to have to go through a lengthy process which included filling out a support form. I personally have never tried to cancel my subscription, but I set out to see what the process would be like.
First of all, I couldn’t find any options to do so on the Spotify app, so it already felt like they were making it more difficult for me to cancel. I discovered you have to go to the account page on the website and click “switch plans” to switch to the free plan. I find it a bit strange that they don’t have a clear “Cancel Subscription” upfront.
Other than that though, I haven’t found too many issues with Spotify. Overall, I’ve really enjoyed my experience with the platform and will continue to use it!
