Redesign the mobile experience of Discover Weekly for students

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Spotify is an audio streaming company; its products include music, podcasts, audiobooks, playlists, recommendations, creator tools, subscriptions, and ads.

Spotify’s Discover Weekly is a personalized weekly playlist intended to help listeners find new music with minimal effort. For students, music discovery often happens in short mobile sessions between classes, during commutes, while studying, at social gatherings, or through peer influence on campuses. Their listening needs can shift quickly by mood, schedule, identity, budget, and social context.

Redesign the mobile experience of Discover Weekly for students. Focus on the end-to-end experience of how a student notices the playlist, decides whether it is relevant this week, listens, saves or skips tracks, shares discoveries, and returns over time. Consider both individual discovery and the ways students discover music through friends, trends, creators, and campus culture.

Your scope is the Spotify mobile app experience around Discover Weekly, not a full redesign of Spotify or its recommendation algorithms. You should identify the most important student user needs, pain points in the current workflow, and product opportunities that could improve engagement, satisfaction, and retention without compromising Spotify’s broader personalization and creator ecosystem.

The experience should consider:

- Student contexts such as studying, commuting, exercising, parties, dorm life, and short breaks between classes

- How students evaluate whether a weekly playlist is worth their time in a crowded mobile app experience

- Discovery friction, including repetitive recommendations, lack of context, limited control, or difficulty finding songs again

- Social behaviors such as sharing tracks, comparing discoveries, following trends, and discovering through peers

- Differences between free and premium student users, including ad interruptions, offline use, and price sensitivity

- How the experience supports creators and helps students build long-term listening habits

- Mobile interaction constraints such as quick scanning, one-handed use, notifications, lock-screen behavior, and limited attention

- Success signals that would show the redesign is improving discovery quality and student engagement

The goal is to define a student-centered mobile product experience for Discover Weekly that makes personalized music discovery feel timely, useful, and habit-forming while staying aligned with Spotify’s strengths in personalization, discovery, retention, and audio engagement.