The research: What does "social" mean?
The first step I took was to conduct a user interview on a member of my prospective audience. In the questions asked, I focused not only on Spotify but on social media as a whole, asking my interviewee broad questions about how social media impacts her life both positively and negatively, along with digging into more minute features in specific apps. The complete user testing notes can be found at the link below.
User testing notes Figma fileGiven the context of this being a class project, I had the opportunity to share information with my classmates, summarizing our user tests in class, presentation style. We worked as a group to summarize the 14 user tests my classmates and I has completed, and organized the information into relevant categories, such as the context for which Spotify was most commonly used, how they used social features to connect with their peers, things users commonly disliked from their various social media apps, etc.


Summarizing the class's collective user interviews helped to clarify what users other than myself found important in both their social media and music-listening experiences. A common thread that stood out to me was the desire to stay connected. This need is summarized well in a quote from one of the user interviews:
“I would like the option to listen to a song that someone else on the other side of the world is listening to at the same time and we can chat and talk about it…this would make people closer.”
The idea of connectedness leading to what many qualified as a "social" feature digitally inspired the idea I ultimately pursued, but the next step in the design process was to take a look at some social application competitors to analyze how they connected both existing friends and strangers across the globe. I did this through two competitive usability audits in which I identified both pain points and bright points of this user flow based on Jakob's Ten Usability Heuristics by the Nielsen Norman Group.

Usability audit Figma fileWith my preliminary research done, I was ready to move on to defining my project.