*Franklin Horn | 2 Jan 24*
When building personalized product experiences, my first design principle is to simplify the user’s decision-making process. I draw inspiration from Steve Krug’s classic web usability guidance:
Don’t make me think.
People approach content products with something in mind — and our goal is take them from a moment of uncertainty and guide them to a moment of clarity on their next step, with as little thought required.
Let’s imagine someone opening Spotify, and they are in the mood for music. The person is thinking about what music they’d like to enjoy, and let’s zero-into those exact thoughts. Some thoughts are well articulated, some are more vague. You can imagine that they could fall anywhere on a spectrum between very broad “I’m interested in music” to something incredibly narrow like “I just Shazamed a song on the radio, got the title, and now I really want to play that one on repeat.” Each thought has some degree of specificity.
Let’s conjure our own taxonomy by classifying people’s intent by the level of specificity, and for simplicity we’ll just break it down into three types: I have a specific idea, some idea,** **and little idea about what I’m seeking. To meet them in that moment, Spotify has developed a variety of product solutions to help guide the person to music. This table helps expose that relationship.
| Level of Specificity | Described in Words | Typical Product Solutions |
|---|---|---|
| Little Idea | I want to listen to music | Browse |
| Some Idea | I want to listen to jazz | Playlist |
| Specific Idea | I want to listen to Duke Ellington & Ella Fitzgerald’s second album together with that one awesome jam, Ella and Duke at the Côte D’Azur | Search |
From a technologist’s point of view, the specific idea persona is actually the easiest to solve with an incredibly familiar product solution. “If you tell me your specific idea by typing it into a little text box, I can check our database, see if we have it, and bring it back to you,” otherwise known as Search. For the individual, all I need to do is take the concept in my head, translate it into my preferred language like English, and then type it into a search bar, and hit enter:
Any jazz fans reading?
We’re so accustomed to Search in every digital product we use daily that we can easily forget that Search once did not exist, and some smart technologists designed and built it to solve for a particular pain point at the beginning of the internet, how to sift through all the thousands of new internet pages for the information I seek? That means we can also easily take for granted that people have a range of specific ideas about what they seek. The less specific, the harder it can be for a technologist to accurately develop a product solution.
At the other end of the spectrum are those with little idea about what they seek. “I want to listen to music” is a terrific moment for Spotify because the person has arrived despite a broad urge and somehow undistracted by Calm, Netflix, Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja, and others in the attention economy that could easily attract the person.
From the individual’s perspective, they aren’t really in a moment that they can currently articulate what interests them in a format that a technologist can easily interpret. This is a significant challenge for the Spotify team to then identify the best song to play for the person. The possibilities exceed 100 million different tracks. So what’s a technologist to do but offer up a browse experience with a range of content, like a homepage, in the hopes the person sees something compelling.
After your neighborhood record store, the ultimate catalog browsing experience: Spotify Home
“I came here for music. Oh, that song from Billie Holiday looks interesting, I don’t recognize that album cover photo. Let me listen.” Sounds like a successful journey on the Spotify home! The strongest content apps are the ones that identify the person’s level of specificity and provide them with the right product solution for them in that moment.
Sometimes people cannot describe their idea. Imagine signing up for Skillshare, the online education marketplace. These people are interested in learning a new skill, like Digital Illustration, Watercoloring, Music Production, etc. They are presumably beginners in the skill and beginners are unlikely to possess the vocabulary to articulate what they needed to learn. We couldn’t present a blank Search box to them at the beginning of their journey, it would be ineffective. As another example, think back to beginning your career as a product manager. Would you have enough knowledge to be able to write “QA” or “wireframing” or “competitor analysis” or “internal stakeholder alignment” into a search bar?
Spotify has a track record of identifying these wordless opportunities. In September 2022, they launched GetReadyWithMusic experience.
