Social music application / Case Study
A whiteboard became a shared music ritual.
A friend’s Song of the Day whiteboard became a social music experience shaped by the friends who used it.
Overview
One song a day became a shared ritual.
Spotlight began with a real ritual: a friend writing his Song of the Day on a whiteboard outside his room. The idea was to preserve the intimacy and constraint of that moment when the group was no longer sharing the same physical space.
Challenge
Challenge
Translate a deliberately small ritual into a digital product without turning it into another noisy social feed. The one-song-a-day constraint needed to remain meaningful while the product supported conversation, memory and music discovery.
My role
My role
I shaped Spotlight from the original product concept through interface design and implementation, building the Flutter mobile beta and web experience, integrating Spotify, and using feedback from the friend group to decide what to build next.
Solution
Solution
The first version focused on posting one daily song. Watching friends use it revealed what mattered next: reactions, context, revisiting earlier picks and saving music to Spotify. Those features followed observed behaviour rather than a speculative roadmap.
Engineering
Engineering
Spotlight combines Spotify authentication, search, song metadata and playlist actions across a web experience and a more developed Flutter mobile beta. Maintaining it meant working through real API constraints and unexpected product behaviour over time.
Outcome
What changed.
Spotlight grew from a one-song posting tool into a recurring social ritual for sharing, reacting to and rediscovering music. Real usage shaped the roadmap while the original daily constraint stayed intact.
- Friends returned to share and discover music
- The original ritual remained the centre of the experience
- Feedback directly shaped reactions, notes and saving flows
- A working web experience and Flutter mobile beta
Key points
What the work included.
- One-song-a-day sharing built around an existing friend-group ritual
- Flutter mobile beta and companion web experience
- Spotify authentication, search, metadata and playlist actions
- Reactions, notes, history and favourites shaped by observed use
- Daily Challenges that gave each recommendation a playful prompt
Project screens
Inside the work.
Lesson
Users using a product differently is not automatically a failure. It can be the clearest signal of what the product actually means to them.
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