Spotify Car Mode
Spotify saw a major opportunity to engage users in the car, recognizing the significant potential of this listening moment and its massive market share opportunity. Partnering with C-suite stakeholders, my team and I led the development of a minimum viable product to seize this chance.
As Design lead at Spotify’s
Cars & Wearables design team
Credits:
Oldsmobile
Walky Talky
Rolls Voice
Car mode for Android
An experience certified for driver safety by the highest standards according to NHTSA, powered by Spotify’s own voice assistant.
Scope included
Identifying the opportunity
Crafting a compelling narrative to align strategy with senior leadership (VP of Product)
Securing a spot on the product roadmap
Defining the overall UX strategy and experience
Driving experimentation in collaboration with engineering and UXR teams
Results
Increased engagement
Increased adoption of voice users
Certified Highest standard for driving safety (NHTSA)
Main responsabilities
Experience design strategy
Opportunity assessment
Design system creation
Spotify Voice & multimodality
The final product was designed with Spotify Voice at its center, ensuring a hands free experience with easy voice retrieval. Users can make final selections and perform other simple interactions through touch.
Creating Spotify voice
The voice assistant could be summoned by either touch or wake word
Voice UX & multiple results
Providing multiple results enhances the user experience, especially when using voice commands, which differ from traditional search methods. Users often refine their needs mid-search—such as using an artist's name to explore their tracks or albums.
Multiple voice results
The final voice result screen offered users multiple options to choose from.
Users could issue simple play commands or ask Spotify Voice to browse content using a show command. They could even save songs to a playlist or start a radio station based on a track that matched their mood—a need frequently observed during user studies.
Visual treatment of voice assistant
Credits to: Nicola Felaco / Aaron Paul
Onboarding & Adoption of
“Hey spotify”
The main challenge with voice assistants is user adoption. Introducing users to a new feature—a new version of "Their Spotify"—is inherently difficult.
When the screen is idle, short messages appear, guiding users on how to use the voice feature. This also acts as a screensaver, keeping the screen awake in car mode to avoid the distraction of unlocking the device, while conserving battery.
Gradual voice onboarding
Contextual messages depending on user intent
A voice command to help users stay in a certain vibe. This command would initiate radio based on the playing track
Touch areas & glanceability
The app was designed to be readable from a meter away, with large touch areas to prevent tapping errors—ideal for bumpy roads. The player view featured simplified controls, quick voice command access, and a prominent close button. Swiping was streamlined exclusively for skipping tracks, enhancing reliability.
Large touch zones kept interactions easy, while icon sizes stayed modest. A simplified scrubbing feature was added, using a modal with oversized numbers for smooth navigation.
Larger touch areas and less decisions on each screen make interaction robust and easy to interact with in a bumpy car
An exaggerated scrub view for glanceable numbers making tracking very intentional
Enlarged touch areas were implemented for improved usability and precision.
Mode Switching
Switching between car mode and the regular app ensures users don’t feel stuck and can access features not designed specifically for car mode.
Jumping between modes
Users would automatically be put in car mode when their phone connected to the car's Bluetooth. To avoid confusion, a message would appear the first few times this happened.
Once in car mode, a white floating button allowed users to quickly switch between the regular app and car mode in case of faulty signal or other distractions.
Supported by Pagination & robust interaction patterns
To minimize accidental interactions and reduce distractions, all interactions were designed to be robust and intuitive. Multi-directional swiping was eliminated, and touch areas were enlarged for ease and accuracy.
Pagination & robust interaction patterns
To help users to navigate through Spotify content while driving, all Car Mode content surfaces were supported by a pagination paradigm instead of smooth scrolling.
Showing content on a page helps to skim bite-sized information while looking back and forth between the road and the screen.
The driver can go to the next page whilst looking at the road and not lose control of where they are.
Part of the design system
I spearheaded the UX and UI efforts, completely reworking core components and playback logic to address the unique demands of car mode.
Design system & playback logic
In this project, I was responsible for managing and overseeing the application’s entire ecosystem of components and logic. This role demanded meticulous attention to detail and a deep understanding of the interactions between each element within the system.