2018 - 2019,  Spotify

Design Lead for launching Spotify in India

India has an incredibly rich music culture and to best serve this market, we wanted to go beyond content localisation and launch a custom-built experience. 

I had the privilege of leading the design efforts for our India launch, alongside key colleagues: Owen Smith as product lead, Swaroop Narasimha as tech lead, and Heli Rantavuo as insights lead. Working closely with Spotify designer Shamik Ray, I crafted hands-on designs for our custom features.

Approach

India is a country of 1.3 billion people, 22 official languages, and the largest online population in the world. Therefore, it was crucial to understand and define who we were designing the initial launch product for. Through meticulous analysis of key figures, competitors, and potential audiences and their needs, we chose the audience to focus on at launch and defined the value proposition of our product. 

We worked closely with local teams of researchers, engineers, and cultural tastemakers to ensure that Spotify would meet or exceed the expectations of the target audience. Additionally, we made sure that everyone in the product development team had the chance to travel to India at least once to gain firsthand experience of the market. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to make several trips to India, visiting people’s homes and schools. It turned out that music really is a unifying force, and the needs people have when it comes to audio listening are mostly similar, regardless of their cultural background, with some distinct cultural nuances.

You can read more about the insights work in Spotify’s design blog.

Features

Even though we were developing a custom build for India, we didn’t want to end up creating and maintaining India-specific features. Instead, where possible, we aimed to build a platform that allows for scaling or repurposing of those experiences in other markets as well. Below are some examples of what was built and shipped. 

Language Onboarding

Considering the amount of languages spoken in India it was clear that Spotify should be language-aware, allowing users to pick the languages that they want to consume their audio and get relevant recommendations throughout the experience. While it was a must-have feature for India, it would greatly benefit anyone who speaks multiple languages. We explored several solutions for capturing user's language and taste signals and ended up with a simple two step onboarding where user first picks languages and then artists filtered by the language choices. The home view, search and other key surfaces of the app took the language choices into consideration and user could easily go back and adjust their language selection. 

Phone Number Sign Up

When introducing a new service, it is crucial to ensure the early funnel is as frictionless as possible. Phone number sign-up stood out as one of the most commonly embraced methods for authenticating users in mobile services across India. Phone number authentication reduces the risk of duplicate accounts or fraud and ensures accessibility to a larger portion of the population who might not use email. I delivered detailed designs and supported the engineers in building OTP-verified phone number authentication on iOS and Android, as well as on the Spotify.com website.

Free On Demand

Every competitor in India offers free streaming with full control, so it was clear from the beginning that we needed to do the same. That's why, for the first time ever, we were able to provide a free tier with full on-demand capabilities, allowing users to play songs in order and pick and play any song without limitations. From a design perspective, we supported the team in reducing playback limitations and defined how key surfaces, such as the home view, could be improved when limitations on which sets users could play frictionlessly were lifted.

Diwali Easter Egg

When we had a bit of extra time on our hands, we wanted to do something nice to celebrate a significant cultural moment in India: Diwali. Diwali, known as the 'festival of lights,' is one of the most widely celebrated occasions in India. If a user was listening to a Diwali playlist, the Now Playing View was dimmed and the seekbar lit up with a sparkler, creating a delightful moment of serendipity. This idea was designed by me and another Spotify designer, Nora Löf, and was built and shipped in less than a couple of weeks. It made its comeback in 2022 as part of a larger Diwali campaign.