Designing Music for Smartwatches

As a master's thesis student at Spotify, I researched how people find and control music on small wearable screens. I used the thesis findings in my later design work on Spotify’s Garmin app.

I started with stakeholder interviews and a competitive scan of smartwatch music players to understand the landscape.

Then I recruited and interviewed 20 U.S. users, mapping their behavior into personas, journeys and user stories.

To test in realistic conditions, I built Axure and web prototypes that played real music on a wrist-mounted iPhone, a working stand-in for a smartwatch.

Across five rounds of prototyping and testing I validated the core hypotheses and refined the button-mapping patterns.

The study produced design guidelines and interaction patterns that I later used in my Garmin app design work.

It was published as the thesis "Designing a User-Centered Music Experience for the Smartwatch", Spotify's first wearables research and first set of wearable guidelines.

I carried the work into my Spotify internship across Garmin, Wear OS and Apple Watch.