Building Spotify's custom ad experiences
1 Designer, 2 Devs, over 2 months
Product Design
Mobile
Research
UI Design
~2-4 minute read
As the product designer, I...
Designed the first self-serve tool for interactive ad experiences at Spotify
Created and managed a component library of 60+ reusable campaign creation elements
Partnered with marketing teams and direct clients to translate campaign feedback into strong UX/UI improvements
The Problem
Spotify Stage Studio (The Stage) is a platform that was created to host Spotify's more interactive ad experiences, like quizzes and playlist generators. This platform drives some of the most unique advertising use cases on the platform. When I joined the team, the process of creating one of these campaigns was highly manual, this meant that we had:
Sole reliance on external agencies to create these experiences
High barrier to entry for clients due to bloated costs that come with bespoke campaigns
Campaigns that took months to create, wasting time for clients and partners
Context
For more background on Spotify Stage Studio, here is an ad experience that has recently run on the platform.
Research
Through a combination of stakeholder interviews & competitive analysis, we uncovered a few insights that would guide design. These findings validated that our focus should be on flexible templates over deep customization. They should feel like Spotify rather than injecting the brand into the user's listening experience.
Impact & brand association
Mid-sized advertisers cared far more about performance and associating themselves with Spotify than pixel-level customizations.
Unique identity & credibility
Brands choose Spotify for its identity. Running an ad that feels like it's in partnership with Spotify lends it to being more credible.
More bang for their buck
The most valued output from the experiences are the playlists that users receive. They live in the user's library for ever and feel authentically Spotify.
Process
The first step was creating a base component library to handle the scalability of all future templates. The MVP for this project was shipping 4 core experiences. These would be a Playlist Generator, Song Quiz, Standard Quiz, and a User Analyzer.
Each experience follows the same logic, with room for visual distinction coming from colors, brand assets, and layout choices of the core experience pages. The guiding principle for all of this was making the experience feel like adaptable for brands, while being built on Spotify's ecosystem for design consistency & the co-branded feel.
Solution
The final design allows brands to mix and match pre-built templated pages for the various experiences.
Design highlight 1
Modular component library for rapid template creation, even by non-design teams.
Design highlight 2
Configurable layout variations to support new ad formats as platform evolves.
Impacts
Early outcomes of this platform have been promising. It just recently launched but here is what we know so far:
Creation of ad experiences went from taking weeks to just hours with the new tooling
Increased adoption from mid-sized markets such as India
Internal Spotify campaigns used the system to test conversions to premium with over 20 million impressions and a conversion of above 4%
Reflections
Navigating design constraints
When I began my design journey in 2021, I had a belief that constraints meant a stifling of creativity. As I have grown in this world, however, I find so much more benefit in viewing them as ways to sharpen focus. If something doesn't work given your constraints, it is clearly not the right path forward.
Designing for scale
Knowing that this system would outlive my time at Spotify, it really changed my focus from making design choices that work in the moment, to creating a foundation that others would be able to build on. I really got to flex my documentation skills to prepare future teams for use. It also meant that file hygiene was radically important.