Usability & Accessibility of Spotify
Spotify is an app that I have used for years to listen, share, and organize music. Part of the reason it has become a staple for me is because of its usability, however, on further inspection, I think Spotify lacks features that make it an inclusive app for users with disabilities.
Before looking into where Spotify can improve on accessibility, let’s review what it does well. For a product to be usable, it needs to be learnable, efficient, memorable, forgiving, and satisfying.
Usability
Spotify cultivates learnability and efficiency by being incredibly simple and intuitive. When hovering over content, the user is prompted with possible actions like ‘play’ and ‘like’. This maintains the simplicity of the layout and inhibits information overload by presenting only the information the user needs at the time. Additionally, when hovering over CTA buttons and clicking, the content image shrinks slightly to let the user know that an action has been performed.
Spotify also reduces the user’s memory load by being consistent throughout and providing clear instructions with recognizable icons. For example, in the screenshop below, you can see that there is a clear icon and highlight distinguishing the currently playing song and songs the user is hovering over. Spotify also incorporates a double click to play songs which emulates double clicks people use to open programs on their computer. Spotify also allows to pause a song with multiple CTA buttons or hit the back button if they’ve made an incorrect selection.
Overall the intuitive, simple design of Spotify’s app allows users to easily access and organize the content they want without distracting them. Spotify is satisfying to use because it’s easy and allows its content to take center stage.
Accessibility
Despite it’s usability however, Spotify fails to maximize it’s potential for accessibility. To understand this, it is important to know Spotify’s potential audience and what they can currently utilize to make Spotify more accessible. For starters, users who have visual and auditory disabilities might find it initially difficult to use Spotify’s app. For users who are experiencing a visual impairment may not be able to read the small, default font size. This can be remediated with a keyboard function but Spotify’s ability to accommodate that tool isn’t easily accessible. Users would have to already know that command or look for 3rd party information. Additionally for users with auditory disabilities, Spotify doesn’t include an equalizer that would allow these users to adjust bass levels to make hearing certain frequencies easier to hear and enjoy. Additionally, some songs provide users with lyrics but that isn’t consistent throughout the app. In those cases, users would have to leave the app and search for lyrics from a 3rd party, preventing them from having a smooth listening experience. Spotify can remediate these accessibility issues by allowing users to customize their settings more and by being more explicit about features they currently employ.
Ethics
The only potential ethical concern Spotify incites is that despite being advertised as a free music streaming service, the number of ads it’s free service includes renders the app somewhat non-functional. Aside from that however, I think it is safe to say that Spotify does not utilize any dark patterns. My search for dark patterns online yielded a few examples of misleading CTA buttons when attempting to cancel but those seem to have been removed and now include CTA buttons that make it easy from premium users to cancel if they’d like to.
Overall I think Spotify is a great tool for listening to music and does a great job of being usable and intuitive. I do however, think Spotify still has much to incorporate if they want to be considered an inclusive product. My hopes in the future is that these accessible designs will be the norm on not just Spotify but products in general.