Standardised navigation system: Research insights
July 2021 - November 2021
Insights from research on improving navigation at Spotify, to ensure that developers on feature teams have out-of-the-box support for all their navigation needs without having to build custom solutions.
Team
Spotify 🇬🇧
Working full-time remotely, as a senior product designer on the client platform team.
Collaborators
Alireza Pazirandeh, Oscar Fredriksson, Mauricio Portilla, Hassan BelHabib Filali
Platform
N/A
Contributions
User research, User interviews, Research synthesis
Here, there and everywhere
I joined the client platform squad at Spotify in the summer of 2021, a time when the squad was looking to improve several aspects of the app’s navigation and needed product guidance on the best way to do that.
Navigation on Spotify is understandably complex, and was only growing to be more complex as the app and the design system evolved. There was no central entity that was fully aware of the navigation state of the app, largely because many types of navigation weren’t “officially” supported by the existing system. This meant that feature developers (devs working on customer-facing features of the app) usually have to build custom components, leading to numerous inconsistencies in the UI and codebase.
Our goal was to create a navigation system where most use cases were officially supported, while providing clear guidelines on how to implement new types of navigation. Simply because if more use cases are supported out-of-the-box, there will be fewer opportunities for inconsistencies to appear, creating a better standard for navigation.
Goal
The Client Platform team (Pitaya) was looking to improve the navigation system of the Spotify app, to ensure that developers have out-of-the-box support for all their navigation needs without building custom solutions.
Outcome
Based on research insights, I made recommendations that would guide the technical design of the new standardised navigation system, such as improving; modal support, deep-linking and URI flexibility.
Ground work
Before talking to any of the customers, I put together a research plan with the help of my teammates to define clear goals to guide the project, draft my interview script, select participants and schedule interview sessions.
Standardised navigation system — research plan
I interviewed 7 engineers and 3 designers across 8 squads over 4 weeks, to get a diverse perspective of how squads use navigation in their day to day work.
Interview participants by team
My interviews questions were centred on how squads currently use the navigation system — their experiences with URIs, logging, page transitions, nested flows and dynamic resolution of targets. Here are some questions from the script:
What do you think of the current URI system?
What’s your experience working with nested flows in your feature(s)?
How does your team currently handle logging, and what type of data do you log when
navigating from page to page?
How do you currently handle use cases for pages with variants?
Research insights
Screenshots from interview mural board
Grouping quotes from the sessions helped me draft a comprehensive list of pain points and opportunities that helped put the squads’ needs into perspective, in one voice — so to speak.
Each interview lasted about 50 minutes with the engineers explaining the role of their squads, how they use the current URI (uniform resource identifier) based navigation system and what they would like to see supported.
After the sessions, I listened through the recordings, summarised my findings and grouped them in an affinity map.
Recommendations
Based on insights from the research, I was able to make several recommendations to the squad, including; prioritising standardised modal support — bottom sheets, pop-ups, banners etc, deprioritising shared element transitions, as all research participants believed there were more pressing concerns, and better support for deep-linking.
There were lots of learning moments for me on this project, as I’ve primarily leaned towards product and visuals for most of my design career, so this was a great opportunity to contribute another aspect of my skills while seeing under the hood of one of my favourite apps.