Spotify eyes an opening with kids

Younger children are front and centre of new music and video apps that don’t impinge on adults.

The new music app for children, Spotify Kids, is being road-tested in the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand. Picture: Supplied

A new version of the Spotify ­experience greets the user by name, plus a friendly “Hi!”

It is a simple touch befitting Spotify Kids, a version of the music-streaming app for children between the ages of three and 12 that is now being tested in Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand. Spotify Technology describes the app, available for no additional fee to Spotify Premium Family members, as a “playground of sound”.

To the grown-up observer, the most obvious change is visual rather than aural: Spotify’s customary, hacker-chic dark interface has been lightened up. Spotify Kids is full of bright, appealing colours and whimsical doodles, including an animated critter of the user’s choosing that serves as an ever-present avatar. In fact, there are two modes within the app, one for younger users with softer pastel tones, and one for older users with more vivid colours and ­hipper, humorous graphics, like a T- rex wearing sunglasses.

Both versions boast a clean, stripped-down interface, with less text. It is appealing to children’s eyes and sympathetic to their cognitive skills. It also is ergonom­ically kinder to children’s hands: There are fewer features to fiddle with and the touch targets, or buttons, are significantly larger and hence easier for smaller thumbs and fingers to reach.

Children are Spotify’s next generation of listeners, said Jessica Forbes, vice-president of research and development at Spotify Premium, which has only been available to those ages 13 and up. “But we realised there was nothing out there from a music standpoint, from an audio standpoint, that is designed just for kids.”

User experience was traditionally considered part of the design process, but now it is considered integral to the success of the entire business, said Matt Olpinski, a UX designer who runs his own business, Matthew’s Design Co, in ­Rochester, New York. “Without a great user experience, the product or business will have lower conversions, less engagement and ultimately fewer users.” Designing apps and websites for children puts that in stark relief.

Designers at PBS Kids once had to figure out the best way to display a stop button on a video app for users from two to eight years old, said Sara DeWitt, vice-president of PBS Kids Digital. “We got into focus groups and we discovered that younger members of the audience, when they were done watching, just got up and walked away,” she said; they had no concept of stopping a video.

The designers also had to figure out how to let children watch videos full-screen without overcomplicating the controls. In the end, the app didn’t make it an option: It automatically expanded videos if someone watched for seven or eight seconds without touching the screen, Ms DeWitt said.

Companies need to pay more attention to the way children use digital products, Ms DeWitt said.

While children’s content is in no short supply on these services, Spotify Kids represents the first ­effort by a major streaming service to create an entirely new app ­intended for young users to interact with on their own, with little, if any, parental assistance.

As for the music, Spotify Kids contains a wading pool of 6000 songs instead of the adult version’s 50 million or so. Humans keep out inappropriate content by manually choosing the songs on Spotify Kids, making playlists, and reviewing lyrics and album artwork.

The app’s playlists of liked songs is called “Your Favourites” as ­opposed to grown-ups’ utilitarian “Liked Songs”. Another ­aspect of Spotify Kids is that parents’ automatically generated Spotify playlists won’t be contaminated by their children’s music tastes. “It’s liberating parents’ ­algorithms,” Ms Forbes said.

the Wall Street Journal