SPOTIFY • FALL 2022 - 2024

Re-defining the end-to-end sharing experience for millions of users

OVERVIEW

We built a new end-to-end sharing experience, to allow internal teams to make their features shareable, and to meet the growing needs of sharers and receivers of shared content. I was one of the leads driving design and design strategy.

ISN’T SHARING JUST A BUTTON?

Yes, and that’s by design. We want it to make it easy for fans and creators to extend the Spotify experience beyond our own platform, to drive user grwth, brand affinity and creator growth.

But there was one problem: Spotify is huge, and more and more teams were building their own custom sharing experiences for their feature. This resuletd in a broken UX for users, and wasted resources for internal teams.

OPPORTUNITY

A single, flexible sharing system should serve diverse feature needs across the product

We sat on a ton of research, and after synthesis the insights we established five leading experiences principles:

People share music to express identity, mood, and point of view. Systems should preserve and amplify meaning, not reduce sharing to a transactional send.

The value of a share is determined by who receives it. Sharing feels safer and more meaningful when directed at the right people rather than the largest audience.

A share does not imply immediate interaction. Systems should support saving, revisiting, and deferred engagement as first-class behaviors.

Whether a share is opened depends on situational context and perceived relevance, not just ease of access. Users continuously weigh effort against expected value.

People are more likely to share when they feel in control of how content is presented, interpreted, and received—especially for personal or expressive shares.

Effective sharing systems optimize for intent, audience, and meaning. Not just speed and reach.

SOLUTION

To address this, we team built a more generic and scalable share menu, with the goal to collect all share flows in the same place.

By doing this, we want to enable all teams internally to easily make their content shareable, while adhering to specific feature requirements by offering a flexible platform.

TESTING, LEARNING, ITERATING. AND REPEAT.

Together with some very talented user researchers, we carried out a dozen rounds of both moderated and unmoderated usability research, to land on the final sharing design.

Tweaks and iterations after each round of research meant we ended up with something that works beautifully and makes the most sense for our users.

Some of these research initiatives were more robust to understand and question our truths, and others were more quick and dirty to quickly test a hypothesis.

From user research, it became clear that users share for a variety of reasons, and share a variety of things. And that they have a strong need to personalize and customize the thing they share, according to who and where they share to.

Different share formats require different capabilities. Which requires different flows. Some formats require editing before sharing, whilst others are ready to share right away. For the latter, editing should be optional as not to increase friction to share.

We needed to make it simple to just share what you intended to share, the way you want to.

The new sharing experience allows for different logics: upon hitting share, users can either be taken directly to an editor or to the share menu where they can pick their destination. This depends on each entry point and format.

Breakdown of the new share menu

Logic #1

Share menu, with optional editing step

Logic #2

Compulsory editing step before landing on the share menu

The share sticker: an icon in the making

As part of the share menu rework, we identified an opportunity to evolve the share sticker rendered on story-based destinations such as Instagram Stories and Snapchat. Since we’re systemizing the share menu, we also needed to come up with a share sticker system that other teams can pick up and build on top of easily. In turn we’ll have a consistent share sticker design regardless of what you were sharing.

These platforms are not only a major driver of deep link opens (one link gets seen by many people), but also play an important role in brand affinity and word-of-mouth distribution.

This sticker underwent several visual iterations and A/B tests, some loved more than others.

What we started off with (version 1) was simple, but maybe too simple. In the social landscape, it faded away and didn’t feel Spotify. Plus, it wasn’t much for internal teams to build off of if they wanted to use it for their feature.

Version 2 was bold. We wanted to do something more editorial. So we did a complete facelift that would be able to stand out in a world of content overload.

After lots of specc-ing and stress-testing this across content types, character lengths and languages, we sent it off to an A/B test.

And long story short: users hated it, and the data said it too. Our deeplink opens (i.e. receivers clicking on a link after seeing the sticker) dropped with 5%, which is huge in the context of sharing.

From usability insights (and lurking Reddit threads) it became clear that it was simply too graphical for a casual Story share. It didn’t need to be so dramatic. Plus, it wasn’t modular in the sense that it would be hard for internal feature teams to build off of.

So back to the drawing board again, and we eventually landed on version 3 which has still stood the test of time. This time, we borrowed inspiration from the mobile app UI, borrowing elements from mobile cards to create a sticker that felt modular and simple, but could still stand out and bring creator imagery like Canvas to life.

The result was an iconic share sticker, shared by friends, old flings and celebrities like Taylor Swift!

The receiver experience got a revamp too

Given that sharing follows a growth loop, the receiver experience is as important as the sharing experience.

A smooth sharing experience means nothing if the receiver experience is broken.

We know that a big user pain-point is around the inconsistent previews/thumbnails on messaging platforms not accurately reflecting the content that is being shared.

So we optimzed the preview experience for several content types like playlists and lyrics.

OUTCOMES

Engagement & adoption

What we measured:

Increase in shares
Increase in deep link opens
Increase in ≥30s streams originating from shares

We improved the effectiveness of sharing as a discovery and activation mechanism, evidenced by higher deep link open rates, and stronger downstream listening intent (≥30s streams).

Capability expansion & cost reduction

What we measured:

New shareable content types: podcast chapters, transcripts, music videos, daylists

What changed:

Feature teams can enable sharing without bespoke solutions
Reduced duplicated design and engineering effort

We enabled other teams by expanding the surface area of what can be shared and unlocking new shareable content types across audio and video, enabling sharing to better reflect user context, intent, and moment.

We reduced time and cost for internal teams by providing a generic, scalable sharing platform that allows new content types to become shareable without bespoke design or engineering work

CLOSING WORDS
This project brought on so many incredible opportunities. The biggest one being the opportunity to present in our annual Design Days conference in 2022, where 300+ designers from Spotify gathered in Barcelona to celebrate and learn from each other. I presented alongside my designer-partner-in-crime Hanna Norlin and our manager at the time, Oylum Serin.

I also created a pitch reel video using After Effects to give our vision life.