Last.fm
TL;DR
Problem
My Solution
Impact
My Role
Deliverables
Background
Background
Where Last.fm users are streaming
How Last.fm users view the product
Personas (Click to expand)
SWOT Analysis (Click to expand)
Problem statements
Forums shifted to social media and they’re now shifting to apps like Discord, making them even more insular and more isolated. Listening to music and sharing that experience is a community activity.
Opportunity: Last.fm is in the unique position of being a central place for data that all of these communities use, as well as having a ton of social framework that isn’t being used
How might we use Last.fm’s placement as a way to augment the current landscape rather than lure people away from their communities?
Users love recommendations for new music or events, but they do not like it when those recs are inaccurate or feel impersonal
Streaming users love seeing their data and love getting new recommendations but regularly report inaccuracies in recs and data isn’t accessible at all times. Spotify shows data once per year and Apple Music shows monthly reports, but they’re not as deep as Last.fm’s data.
Opportunity: Through a brand deal, Spotify and Last.fm are joined at the hip. Spotify has 246M Premium users, not counting the amount of people on free accounts. Last.fm has 23M users overall, not factoring inactive accounts or duplicates.
How might we provide a truly tailored experience for users that accurately reflects their habits and their community?
Concept
With the problems identified, it's easier to determine where a solution might appear. At the beginning, I believed that the website's activity was mostly passive and that users weren't engaged, but that's not completely accurate. Users are engaged, they're just not engaged on the website itself. They still engage with the data. Towards the start, I envisioned gamifying Last.fm and adding an element of competition to keep people engaged. I asked users if they liked competition and only 60% said they did. That's a majority, but that's not enough to make me think that it would attract users or keep them coming back to the website. I thought about the social media infrastructure that's still on the website, and how all of the users loved their data and recommendations, and thought it could be neat to repackage this data in a way that users hadn't seen on Last.fm.
Direction
I decided that a good way to do this was to implement a feed into Last.fm's app that is entirely made up of content related to a user's friends on Last.fm, that could be explored. The information is all there, but it could work in new ways if implemented this way. I looked back at my interviews and honed in on some themes of sharing behavior with the community. For example, sharing is an active behavior but looking at all of the shared data from all of your friends is difficult.
Current users are logging plays passively, so I added sharing as a passive activity. The feed displays friend activity and doesn't show exactly who listened to what, but it does show you what your friends are listening to as a whole. I also chose to add some emphasis on Last.fm's community-based tag system by including a more focused view of the activity, showing users what genres and tags their friends are listening to. For those who want to share actively, I reintroduced Last.fm's "Obsession" feature, which is like a status update or tweet, but for sharing a song. You can still use this feature on Last.fm today, but it won't tell anyone that you set a new obsession and I wanted to give it another shot to stoke user interaction.
Finally, I wanted to flex Last.fm's algorithms to give users some specific recommendations that feel personal and relevant. The "Based On Your Listening" section is filled with recs that tell users why the album or artist are recommended, based on context like "Your friends like this artist" or "This artist is touring with another artist you like." I think that personal touch is what could separate Last.fm from other services.
Below: screens from my initial wireframes
Last.fm has a concrete brand identity. From its heart iconography to the specific shade of pink-red, they're unmistakable. They're also very, very good at visualizing data. Their graphs are novel, fun, and I could spend hours looking at the data they give on my own personal listening habits. Designing this feed was an exercise in sticking to their branding and not reinventing the wheel when it comes to data presentation. I wanted to show users a reality that's already possible with the data they submit to Last.fm every time they listen to music. I used data that's available to me and was able to construct a feed with interesting insights and new places to explore in the database.
Wireframes showing the "Friends" feed as well as a few of the task flows users could encounter
Testing consisted of a moderated tour with five current Last.fm users who were encouraged to speak openly and candidly while we looked through the feed together. I asked them to follow a couple of task flows, but I didn't feel that it was fair to judge them on the accuracy of the tasks and instead asked them to rate their experience and their attitudes toward the product. I also asked what they felt was missing and wanted to know how they'd want to implement those missing features.
Results:
User Testing attitudes
Select quotes:
"…This is the kind of thing I'd much rather see than the recommendations I get on Spotify."
Attitudes towards the product were heavily in favor of the changes I made and the feature I added as a whole. It's a small sample size, but I know that Last.fm users are raving fans of the product and it felt really good to hear them say it felt natural to their current experience on the app.
One key component I overlooked was the ability to Add A Friend to the home screen. I thought a lot about how current data would appear and didn't even think to add that to the home screen. Users didn't have much of an opinion on how someone's profile would look to outside viewers, so we talked about the current status of the profile page and how it looks as it stands today. Right now, you actually can't view other users' profiles on the mobile app, and your profile page is your menu/settings page. I decided to spruce this up by adding those stats to other people's profiles and the ability to add them as a friend, but decided to not give much more information.
Updated profile page
Looking back at this, I hope my love and appreciation for the current product shows through. I very much enjoyed this project from beginning to end, and it helped me learn a lot of design and layout tricks while working through it. It was great practice and I got faster and faster at making new pages for it, so by the end, I could add anything I wanted and make it fit in with everything else.
One other thing that really excited me about this project was the ability to use framework that already existed and re-integrating it for a new audience. I saw how excited users were about this and I loved being able to tell them that this was already possible. I think it's great to know a product so well that you can find new ways to show off the data you already have.
I know that a lot of UX design focuses on identifying and solving problems, and while I do see this as a solution, I think it makes more sense as a way to augment users' current experiences rather than solve their problems. Augmenting the experience is what Last.fm was built on, and I think that evolving the product would make users eager to use it rather than stay passive like they are now.
Jay Papandreas
Denver, CO
2025
Jay Papandreas, 2025, all rights reserved