Redesign the mobile experience of Playlists for students at global scale

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 Playlists are a core part of how listeners organize, discover, and return to audio. For students, playlists often serve multiple jobs across the day: studying, commuting, workouts, social gatherings, language learning, mood regulation, and discovery of music, podcasts, or other audio formats. The challenge is to rethink the mobile playlist experience for students across global markets, where devices, bandwidth, cultures, schedules, willingness to pay, and audio habits vary widely.

Assume you are designing within Spotify’s mobile app experience, not creating an entirely separate student app. The redesign should account for both free and paid users, solo and social listening, creator and listener ecosystems, and Spotify’s broader goals around personalization, retention, discovery, and monetization. You should focus on the student user journey and the friction they face when creating, finding, managing, sharing, and returning to playlists.

This is a product design question, so the emphasis is on identifying the right student segments, prioritizing meaningful user problems, and defining an experience that can work at global scale. You do not need to produce pixel-perfect UI, but you should be clear about the user workflow, interaction model, success criteria, and trade-offs.

The experience should consider:

- Key student personas and contexts, such as studying, commuting, campus life, exams, parties, remote learning, and low-connectivity environments.

- Current playlist workflow friction, including creation, organization, collaboration, discovery, personalization, search, sharing, and re-engagement.

- Differences across global markets, including language, culture, music availability, pricing sensitivity, network quality, device constraints, and local listening behaviors.

- How playlists can support multiple audio formats without making the experience cluttered or confusing.

- Social and collaborative behaviors among students, including privacy, identity, group ownership, and sharing across platforms.

- How the experience fits Spotify’s ecosystem of recommendations, creators, ads, subscriptions, and retention loops.

- Product constraints such as mobile screen space, recommendation quality, content rights, offline usage, moderation, and scalability.

- What signals and feedback loops would help Spotify learn whether the redesigned playlist experience is valuable for students.

Your goal is to frame a clear product design direction for redesigning Spotify’s mobile Playlists experience for students globally, showing how you would understand the users, identify the most important pain points, define the product scope, and evaluate whether the new experience improves student engagement and long-term value.