© ‘24 This is John Richardson – Staff product designer at Spotify based in Göteborg, Sweden.
Hello
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Bonjour
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Ciao
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Nǐ hǎo
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Konnichiwa
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Hallo
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Merhaba
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Salaam
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Olá
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Hello ◓ Bonjour ◓ Ciao ◓ Nǐ hǎo ◓ Konnichiwa ◓ Hallo ◓ Merhaba ◓ Salaam ◓ Olá ◓
SELECTED WORK
Aligned Curation
The act of curation – adding to playlists & Your Library – is one of Spotify’s core retention drivers. In 2022 we set out to establish a unified system of curation actions that would signal clear intent to our personalization models and scale to both new and existing audio formats.
I collaborated closely with insights, engineering, and senior leadership to define and oversee delivery of the system through a rapid iterative process. We began by casting a wide net, exploring and testing numerous models. After identifying a few promising directions, I collaborated with my engineering partner to develop a proof of concept that we could refine and gather more meaningful feedback on. This approach was instrumental in securing further buy-in to advance the initiative.
Duration
1 year
Status
Shipped ✓
Role
Design lead
Contribution
Product strategy & design
Year
2022 - 2023
Collaborators
Alex Watson, Pär Kjellberg, Miné Miralay, Elena Vigano, Erick Morales, James B
Smart shuffle
Listeners love creating playlists that reflect key moments in their lives, but over time these playlists become stale. Smart Shuffle is a play mode that allows listeners to enjoy fresh content, in the form of recommendations, mixed together with original content from the playlist.
I was primarily responsible for designing the interaction patterns for listener feedback on recommendations – specifically the ability to save them to the playlist or dismiss them.
Duration
1 year
Status
Shipped ✓
Role
Designer
Contribution
Interaction design
Year
2022 - 2023
Collaborators
Jordi Parra, Shang Tsi
Your Library X
Supporting Spotify's strategy to become the world's leading audio network by developing a future-proof framework for audio agnostic retrieval, organization, and management.
I championed the first ever pilot of a beta program within the mobile experience. Traditional research methods gave us a glimpse into pain points associated with the new library experience, but more insight was needed to ensure a smooth rollout. By creating an opt-in beta experience were able receive and analyze feedback from tens of thousands of users; this feedback helped uncover blindspots and pain points that were previously unknown which enabled the team to iterate and make changes before a wider rollout.
Duration
2 years
Status
Shipped ✓
Role
Design lead
Contribution
Product strategy & design
Year
2020 - 2022
Collaborators
Duncan Dragonetti, Ingrid Pettersson, Carl Fredriksson, Raha Dadgar
Publication
Minimizing change aversion through mixed methods research
Feedback Signals
A set of related workstreams aimed at giving listeners more control over what they see and hear on Spotify & understanding listeners’ tastes with more granularity – so that we can provide truly personalized experiences.
Through rapid iterative research we learned that when listeners have limited precision and only broad or vague feedback actions available they are put off taking action because they’re worried that Spotify will get the wrong impression. Given that the intents behind feedback are complex and wide ranging we decided to pursue a two step model in which the primary action results in a functional output, and the secondary action allows users to express their intent with a higher degree of precision.
Duration
1 year
Status
In progress
Role
Design lead
Contribution
Product strategy & design
Year
2023 - 2024
Collaborators
Joe Turner, Becky Houlding
Genre & mood filters
Liked Songs accounts for around 14 % of all listening on Spotify, and 61% of Premium listeners have over 100 songs saved within. As Liked Songs grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage and understand its contents. Genre and mood filters offer a way for listeners to form a language around their music taste, and segment their diverse collections into meaningful sessions.
I collaborated closely with the team formerly known as Echo Nest (which Spotify acquired in 2014) who are primarily responsible for developing a taxonomy to categorize music into various genres and moods. The tags themselves come from a descriptor lexicon which is an ever-growing collection of approximately 15,000 musical and music-related descriptors.
Duration
6 months
Status
Shipped ✓
Role
Design lead
Contribution
Product strategy & design
Year
2020 - 2021
Collaborators
Duncan Dragonetti, Hunter McCurry, Colleen McClowry
Quick scroll
Designed to help listeners traverse large collections of content with ease. Quick Scroll is an advanced adaptation of the traditional alphabetical index scroll, allowing listeners to scroll both chronologically and alphabetically.
I worked with my product partner and an iOS engineer during "hack days"—two days each month dedicated to non-prioritized initiatives—to develop and test a proof of concept. This work ultimately led to the feature being productionized and shipped as part of the Your Library redesign.
Duration
3 months
Status
Shipped ✓
Role
Design lead
Contribution
Product strategy & design
Year
2018
Collaborators
Duncan Dragonetti, Alcides Jorge
Soundscapes
Soundscapes is a content acquisition program that started in 2019 to license ambient noise content for specific, intent-based use cases like relaxation, sleep, and focus. Soundscapes content is programmed across approximately 300 editorial playlists and represents 2% of total music consumption.
The goal of this project was to differentiate the Soundscapes experience from normal editorial playlists and create a more optimal experience for intent based listening.
Duration
2 months
Status
Deprioritized
Role
Design lead
Contribution
Product strategy & design
Year
2020
Collaborators
Soh Nagano, Gabriella Ljunggren
Liked Songs artwork
One of my very first projects at Spotify was to create the playlist artwork for Liked Songs – initially seen as a cheap test, the artwork has since become one of Spotify’s longest standing and most recognizable brand assets.
Duration
1 day 😂
Status
Shipped ✓
Role
Design lead
Contribution
Art direction
Year
2017
Haptics & Swiping
I established internal guidelines on the appropriate use of haptic feedback and swipe actions. During “hack days,” I collaborated with two engineers in my team to review and correct instances of inappropriate haptic feedback usage across the product and implement haptics in several new areas.
Duration
3 months
Status
Shipped ✓
Role
Design lead
Contribution
Product strategy & design
Year
2022
Collaborators
Heiko Winter, Jelle ten Brinke, Gustaf Gunér
