ABRAM COETSEE

Spotify shows an excellent approach offering a multitude of different user-based perspectives on what could be the same content. By situating these different ways of organizing content in a scroll, the user stays engaged. The user is able to find whichever organizational perspective is most well suited to them, and so maneuver the vast archives of content. The following images show different organizational techniques.

We can see how well Spotify allows users to navigate: direct, ergonomic engagement through visual iconography, simple touch patterns (scrolling and swiping), and minimal description. This alleviates the complexity of searches, subfolders, while maintaining the connection between user and content.

There are really only slight variations between each of the three categories: we might not even notice if the structure labels were traded. What’s the difference between “favorite,” “top 10 from past 7 years, and “your discovered artists”?

But the progressive elaboration of small differences in the fluid state of a scrolling process allows users to remain “light on their feet” as they move toward the structure that fits their mindset best in the moment. This reinforces the present moment of active—but not burdensome—engagement, and validates the users’ feeling that their particular preferences are worth the time of the app’s design.

These two formats for content organization vary slightly from the previous: the engagement strategy prioritizes the content creator over the user. This allows a different sense of how content is turned into collections: the user won’t feel trapped within their own tastes.

Users benefit from having a “helping hand”: a semi-guided structure when exploring content they’re not yet fully fluent in, or when they want to explore further, but aren’t sure what to search for.

This echoes the research results for the GalleryPal design. Users wanted something that alleviated their anxiety as non-experts, while amplifying the explorative agency of their tastes.