Diwali 2022 Spotify Round-up (India)

Spotify like every year did something interesting to engage with the Indian audience and celebrate Diwali with its free as well as paid subscribers. Although the end-user experience didn’t do much, it still was enough to bring a lot of attention to the festival of lights. As a case study, it’s an insightful one since

utilized some of the top engagement tactics to design its user experience. Here’s a short round-up of the entire tear-down of it.

Approach — Localization

In 2020, India had over 749 million internet users across the country and it would be a big miss if Spotify didn’t build a localized experience for the Indian market. When brands build localized experiences for different countries, the users of those countries tend to connect with the brand at a deeper level and over time the brand can have the ability to appear local.

Some examples of local-like brands in India are Cadbury, Hyundai, Bata, and Maggi. These are all brands with a local offering but were not originated from India.

Let’s go to the design elements next. Spotify made it simple for the users to land on a single vertical scrolling page where all the content related to Diwali was located. To make sure users don’t miss out on the content, they later peppered hyperlinked points on multiple pages of the app. Below is what the structural breakdown of the page looked like.

Spotify’s Diwali Page Breakdown

#1 Stories

Stories are volatile and Spotify safely assumed that its users would easily be able to interact with the UI element that pops up into tappable stories. The UI is similar to all the other social media apps out there like Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more.

Diwali Stories by Spotify

Stories are often overused by social brands these days. But Spotify’s implementation was unique because they are reserving stories as an element only for special occasions like these.

For the story's layout, the designers went safe by using the 50–50 split layout with visuals always at the bottom and text floating on top. I was missing any call to action or an experience like Spotify Wrapped in these stories though. For the look and feel, the app went with a unique Indian-looking illustration style that looked like it came straight out of a Facebook sticker pack.

Psychological Benefit

Designwise, adding a story can be a good move for surfacing walkthroughs, temporary content, or anything that won’t be there for long. Some apps are also using stories like UI to summarize a long article. The risk of getting your stories UI is very minimal because of the digital penetration that products like Instagram and WhatsApp have.

#2 Artists’ Shorts

Artists and brands get a part of the royalty money from Spotify for putting their songs in the product. The artist gets paid based on the number of times a song is paid. It’s a pretty big deal for artists to be featured on Spotify’s platform. The product inserted a version of stories but this time in the form of Artist’s Short that promoted their songs or singles and the fact that people can listen to their work on Spotify. Each of these shorts was linked to the artists’ page and they were both a mix of new and as well as popular songs in the Bollywood and Indian private album domain.

#3 IKEA Effect

To attract users to the app during the festive season, Spotify created a bunch of Diwali Blend Playlists. However, the component also promoted the ability to create playlists. In UX, this trick is known as the IKEA Effect, in which people tend to value something more if they make it themselves. Generally, the IKEA effect refers to how we like things more if we’ve worked hard to make them.

Allowing users to create their playlists did two things here —

1. It used the IKEA Effect to make this playlist more valuable than the playlists that Spotify is providing people with.
2. It had a feature to create a playlist with a friend who they can connect with from their existing Spotify network or invite from their contact list on a messaging platform like Telegram or WhatsApp. This would mean more users would get added to the platform if people end up using the feature.

Besides the user-created playlists, Spotify also provided a host of top songs, playlists, and devotional songs that people are likely to play during the Diwali season in India. Diwali is typically celebrated over 5 days in India and it is one of the most auspicious festivals in India.

Diwali commemorates Ram’s return to Ayodhya after 14 years in exile with his wife Sita and brother Laxman. It was a new moon day in the Kartik season when Ram returned home, so all over the kingdom were lit with diyas and fireworks to welcome him. Diwali signifies the triumph of good over evil as people celebrate together and light diyas to symbolize the triumph of good over evil.

More such reads on Spotify’s user experience —

That’s the end of this short yet hopefully insightful read. Thanks for making it to the end. I hope you gained something from it.

👨🏻‍💻 Join my content verse or slide into my DMs on LinkedIn, Twitter,Figma, Dribbble, and Substack. 💭 Comment your thoughts and feedback, or start a conversation!