Spotify Kids
Role
Product Designer
Responsibilities
Design IC (End-to-End)
Team
X-functional team of eight
Design team of two
Not all ages are created equal: we built in filters to support content across younger and older age groups.
Music kids love, and parents trust
Designing tech for kids is notoriously tricky. They’re highly visual, probably don’t own their own devices, and have little hands that are primed for tapping all over the place. Also, the difference between what a five year old and a ten year old listen to? Massive.
As an extension of our existing Family Plan, we wanted to investigate a growth bet around improving a child’s experience with music: letting them listen to favorite songs, and gaining more trust from parents in letting children drive their own discovery.
The app was recently released as a beta in Ireland, and will be scaled out to more markets over the following year.
If you’re curious how well I knew the words to the Coco soundtrack after this project, the answer is “by heart”.
Tablet in tandem
I focused most of my time on designing the experience for tablet, ensuring we were able to support some of the most popular devices for kids at launch (like dad’s super old iPad!), and experimenting with entity configurations on larger screen sizes.
This was a great opportunity to combine independent mobile views — like browsing and playing — into a single entity.
Highlighted views: Onboarding and avatar selection, Home, Voice Search, and Now Playing.
Focusing the interface
Across the board, we wanted to design an experience that was as simple and engaging as possible: large touch targets, very little text, and a core feature set that still felt like Spotify, but without all the heaviness or complexity.
Features like voice search supported this cause, as well as fullscreen album art and a “Recently Played” carousel on Home (kids always ask to play the same songs over and over again, so we wanted to give them easy access!).
We gave priority to a voice search path for younger children.
Defining a family of color styles to support playfulness and customization.
Diary studies with families were supplemented with in-home interviews in the US and Brazil.
Researching with families
Alongside our lead researcher, the design team was also heavily involved in testing prototypes of the app with families. We traveled to several cities in the US to do in-homes, following up with 80 diary study participants that had spent 8 weeks with the Kids app beta.
These insights were instrumental in shaping decisions for parents and kids alike, not to mention some of the most joyful sessions I’ve ever taken part in.
This little guy was obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine.
A girl in L.A. helps us understand which characters she’d like for her avatar.
Account setup and privacy settings are fully managed by parents.
Parental controls, and peace of mind
Last but not least, safety was a pillar in this work. The Spotify Kids app is fully COPPA and GDPR compliant, and we prioritized privacy for data from the get-go.
Parents are the keyholders for granting access, creating profiles, and selecting content filters, and given full transparency into any information collected along the way.