I’m Mady, a Brazilian designer living in Stockholm. I love exploring how humans behave when interacting with art and culture. You can catch me trying to play new music instruments, gaming, failing to cook or shouting after my dog.
After working for over eight years in Brazil, I joined Spotify in 2016. My work aims to include more of our identity in all the products that shape our everyday experience of culture, not only mobile phones. While some details are confidential, feel free to reach out to learn more about these and other projects.
Product Foundations
⋅
Multi-Platform
⋅
Design Strategy
⋅
Product Foundations ⋅ Multi-Platform ⋅ Design Strategy ⋅
Launching Audiobooks
From 2020 until 2023, I have co-led the listening experience design of audiobooks across Spotify. My role was to understand the complexities that a new content type brings across devices while delivering a listening experience that would fit our core user and business needs.
But also, to identify opportunities and guide teams on improving the audiobook listening experience at their own pace, taking the device and context someone is using into consideration: whether it would be their car, their smartwatch, a voice speaker, a pair of headphones or even their TV.
Company Partnership
⋅
Hardware
⋅
Prototyping
⋅
Company Partnership ⋅ Hardware ⋅ Prototyping ⋅
VAPPEBY: the first IKEA+Spotify product
During 2020 and 2021, I had the chance to co-lead a design collaboration between two beloved Swedish brands. I was the primary designer from Spotify when creating VAPPEBY, from pitching ideas to manual edits and creating a transparent, friendly, and sustainable partnership with a beloved brand. Apart from delivering this project to users, we've traded resources on research, tech and prototyping practices - even building our physical prototypes remotely during COVID and other circumstances that required a more distributed approach.
Company Partnership
⋅
Multimodality
⋅
User Interfaces
⋅
Company Partnership ⋅ Multimodality ⋅ User Interfaces ⋅
Improving the “big screen” experience
The screens that surround our homes are particularly special. Even when we live alone, the information on our own devices can be shared with family, friends, and sometimes with people we do not always intend to. And on other occasions, they are the centre of attention in our social gatherings, or a soothing background to wind down after a busy day.
While working with this team, I’ve improved the login and search experience, and delivered a redesign that included videos and artist imagery to the “now playing” view on TV, Smart Displays and Gaming Consoles. I’ve guided other product designers on multiple teams when leading these projects, improving previously untouched flows, adopting our design system and informing how these surfaces should evolve.
Design Team foundations
⋅
Multimodality
⋅
Prototyping
⋅
Design Team foundations ⋅ Multimodality ⋅ Prototyping ⋅
Getting Car Thing ready for launch
Car Thing is an audio player from Spotify made to be mounted on a car dashboard and interact through the touch screen, voice, and button presses. It was built on the premise that not everyone has the latest car model, but that shouldn’t exclude them from enjoying smart controls without wrangling cables and worrying about getting distracted.
I joined the Car Thing team for three months to support its public launch. My responsibilities were to support hiring new team members and increase collaboration with the engineering and product teams. As a result, I’ve re-structured how to document design specs to improve engagement with them and involved other parts of the company when building the final solutions to share our learnings. I've delivered work on features such as settings, multiple users, presets, consolidating voice interaction patterns and creating a heuristic for voice tips.
Mobile App
⋅
Redesign
⋅
UI
⋅
Mobile App ⋅ Redesign ⋅ UI ⋅
A simpler Spotify Connect
Spotify Connect is one of the user’s most beloved features, and the key to unlocking listening on any device, alone or together. The goal is to keep it simple: frictionless and safe, letting people enjoy audio on their favourite devices. But simplifying comes at the cost of wrangling complexity.
In 2019, I led a redesign to organise the experience, making troubleshooting easier, reducing confusion around the device order, and clarifying the currently playing device. That set the foundations for future improvements around social features and messaging projects from the teams.
Illustration
⋅
Leading Foundational Research
⋅
Learn through Play methods
⋅
Illustration ⋅ Leading Foundational Research ⋅ Learn through Play methods ⋅
Spotify Personas: Understanding music listeners from the US
The personas research started in 2018, intending to get a basic understanding of US listeners’ user needs around music and to form a shared language around them before we ventured into designing solutions within the company.
I’ve worked in two phases of this work: firstly, illustrating and designing the materials that would better communicate the research of personas, and secondly, as the design lead for an evolution of the research into shared listening, understanding how people come together (or drive away from each other) when listening to music with their friends, family and in public.
