Spotify Symphony
Design Spotify's AI music companion — without algorithmic overload.
This was a pet project built for the UXcel Design Challenge: design an AI music companion for Spotify that helps people discover new music without just handing them another passive algorithmic feed. Discover Weekly and Daily Mixes are good — but they're one-directional. There's no back-and-forth, and no sense of why a recommendation showed up.
My angle: music discovery isn't consumption, it's conversation. People don't just want to be told what to like — they want to explore alongside something that's actually listening.
Symphony — a companion that treats discovery as dialogue, not delivery.
A companion with a voice, not just a feature set.
Symphony's personality was deliberately friendly and a little sarcastic — a music-nerd tone rather than a neutral assistant voice. Visuals leaned on music waves and album art instead of generic AI-product visual language, and onboarding asked people to "tell me your music story" instead of building a dry preference profile.
Honest gaps, looking back.
As a pet project, the concept leaned harder into the creative angle than into rigor I'd bring to client work — I'd want to think harder about accessibility and edge cases (what does Symphony do for someone actively skeptical of AI recommendations?), and I'd want real usage data rather than a prototype to know whether "Why This?" actually changes behavior or just reads well in a case study.
Ranked #6 globally in the UXcel Design Challenge.
The concept placed #6 out of the challenge's global cohort — the one hard number from this project I can point to directly. Everything else here is a conceptual exploration, not a shipped, measured product; I'd rather be clear about that than dress it up as more than it is.
We want to explore together.