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 meant to help listeners find new music with minimal effort. For students, mobile listening often happens in fragmented moments: walking to class, studying, commuting, working out, hanging out with friends, or scrolling between social apps. Their discovery behavior may be shaped by tight schedules, changing moods, peer influence, campus culture, budget sensitivity, and short-form music exposure from platforms like TikTok.

Your task is to redesign the mobile experience of Discover Weekly specifically for students. Focus on the end-to-end experience around noticing the playlist, deciding whether it is worth listening to, sampling tracks, saving or sharing discoveries, returning throughout the week, and turning new finds into longer-term listening habits. Consider how students use Spotify alongside playlists, social sharing, podcasts, ads or Premium, and competing discovery surfaces.

The redesign should not assume that “more recommendations” alone solves the problem. Explore where the current workflow may create friction: lack of context for why a song was recommended, difficulty quickly judging tracks, weak social hooks, limited study or mood fit, poor timing, low perceived freshness, or insufficient ways to capture and revisit discoveries.

The experience should consider:

- The primary student user segments and listening contexts, such as studying, commuting, socializing, workouts, and late-night listening

- How students discover, preview, skip, save, share, and revisit music on mobile

- What makes Discover Weekly feel personally relevant, fresh, trustworthy, and worth returning to every week

- How personalization, social influence, campus or peer signals, and creator discovery could fit without making the experience noisy

- Constraints of Spotify’s mobile product, recommendation systems, licensing, ads/Premium differences, and global student markets

- How the experience competes with fast, visual, socially driven discovery habits from TikTok and other platforms

- Success signals that would indicate improved student engagement, satisfaction, retention, and music discovery quality

The goal is to define a student-centered mobile product experience for Discover Weekly that improves discovery, reduces friction, and strengthens Spotify’s role as the place students go to find and keep new music they love.