November 2023 – January 2025 15 Minute Read
Yes, welcome to yet another Spotify project you’ll encounter online. I also fell into the canon event of using Spotify APIs to build a technical project, but that doesn’t stop it from being a great learning experience. I learned how to build a fully functioning Figma wireframe, got familiar with APIs, authorization, and also 2-in-1’ed learning how Chrome extensions work on the side. As a matter of fact, because of how accessible this project is, I still use it – maybe 50 times a day – every time I open a new tab on Google Chrome. Here’s what it looks like:
Unfortunately, Spotify limited its publicly usable APIs to large businesses before I could get it deployed, so only 25 users can have access to this project. If you’re interested, send me an email!
That said, there are two main portions to this blog: (1) How I drew inspiration for this project, and (2) A guide on how I incorporated Spotify APIs with Google Chrome. I wrapped up the first portion in 2023, and reading back at it, there are a lot of holes in this phase and a lack of understanding of how to conduct user research. You can read it for yourself, but I’ve documented these mistakes at the bottom of the page.
Founded in 2006, Spotify is now the world’s leading music streaming service with over 570 million active users. Spotify has expanded upon its influence of audio listening by incorporating podcasts and audiobooks in 2019 and 2023, respectively. With a seemingly increased effort to enhance users’ learning and day-to-day life by developing new features, what could be Spotify’s next launch? With their large influence to increase engagement between people and their activities through music, the idea of Productify was born: a Spotify-productivity Chrome extension that allows users to do tasks in timed flows while listening to music.
Inspired by Spotify’s Design guides, “Collaboration Secrets: Design X Engineering,” and “Navigating the Discovery Phase,” Productify was developed in the following 5 stages: