We have to think through sequencing of tracks, what happens after they hit play, how the user will experience the order of the playlist, and make sure there’s a holistic and unified flow to it all. For our team, it was a strong collaboration between design and engineering.īlending skills together: the collaboration between design and engineeringĭesign and engineering work very closely together at Spotify, especially in the Personalization mission, where we focus on content programming.
It takes a lot to design a coherent experience that’s aligned across different tastes, and build an algorithm that works well for everyone. We had to make sure we weren’t just improving the playlist experience for high compatibility, but also accommodating for lower taste matches. Creating a representative playlist becomes very complicated when you merge two users’ listening together, because some users have very compatible tastes, while others differ drastically in the music they listen to. We spent a lot of time trying to uncover what the ideal playlist output should be. The algorithm for Blend took lots of iteration by lots of engineers. It’s an easy opt-in, opt-out experience where you get to choose who you share your music data with. In designing social experiences, we advocate for user control, which is how Blend works. We approached this thoughtfully, knowing that we typically curate what we share with the world. When making the audio space social, there might be pressure to present yourself a certain way. Although we love to show off fun data points about how we listen, there’s still something very intimate and private about music that we want to preserve. Music is inherently social and there’s a growing influence from other platforms, as we’ve seen from all the viral hits that have been topping the charts this year. Of course, we also had to focus on providing control and accommodating different tastes, but this was a product we were able to craft for user delight - sharing your music with someone simply because you want to. This gave us the space to design an experience that’s just… fun! Through Blend, we’re able to facilitate sharing music without relying on user-generated content the same way that traditional social media platforms do.
It was an interesting product to design because Spotify is at a unique vantage point when it comes to social listening. It’s true to who you are and how you listen. It lets you share your music taste with others and gives you recommendations from loved ones. It’s an effortless and effective way to stay connected - a reunion with an old friend, or an intimate introduction to someone new.
Spotify Blend is a personalized playlist that automatically combines two users’ audio tastes together.
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