Spotify Moments
Spotify Moments is a multi-sensory digital scrapbooking feature that transforms passive listening into a reflective experience, letting users capture and look back on memories tied to the songs that matter most.
Designed as part of SparkJam 2026, the challenge was to add a new creation-centric feature to a typically non-creation-oriented experience. My role was UI design, taking our team's findings and shaping them into screens and a prototype that reflects how deeply people emotionally connect with music.
A song comes on and suddenly you're back somewhere: a car ride, a late night, a moment you didn't know you'd remember. But as soon as it ends, that feeling disappears. This is what drove us to ask our central question.
How might we help Spotify users hold on to the memories and emotions tied to the songs that matter most?
💬 To understand this, we asked 29 music listeners a series of questions and found that songs can become attached to the moments that shape us
Songs can evoke vivid autobiographical memories spontaneously, bringing back multi-sensory details tied to past experiences.
Participants most often formed deep emotional connections to music while traveling and during late nights, ordinary, low-attention moments.
Participants described Spotify Wrapped as a way to revisit emotions, memories, and personal experiences tied to their listening history.
"I look forward to Wrapped every year to see the artists and songs I really connected with throughout the year."
Participant 1
"I always check it because it almost documents my year, like a diary I didn't know I was keeping."
Participant 2
"I open it every December mostly for the memories it brings back, it's the one time I actually reflect on my year."
Participant 3
Research pointed us toward a familiar, intuitive format for capturing personal memories.
Scrapbooking as a practice naturally mirrors how people already preserve meaningful moments, through photos, small details, and reflective writing. It felt like the right metaphor for a music-memory feature.
Scrapbooking prompts users to slow down and reconnect with past experiences rather than passively scroll past them.
It gives people a way to narrate their own lives, capturing not just what happened, but how it felt.
52.2% of participants already use curated photo albums. Moments meets users where they already are.
We audited existing Spotify features, and a few platforms we already use every day, to understand the visual language and find the gaps.
We looked at features like Spotify Party of the Year, Spotify lyrics, Instagram Stories, and YouTube Recap mapping what already existed so we could design something that felt native to Spotify without duplicating what other apps already do well.
I then pulled together a moodboard to define the visual direction before opening Figma.
The moodboard drew from a range of mobile UI references such as note-taking apps, photo viewers, and media players. I explored how other apps handle personal, memory-forward experiences. I was looking for something that felt personal without losing that clean, modern edge without feeling off-brand for Spotify. This became the visual foundation for the rest of the project.
💡 Introducing Spotify Moments: A multi-sensory digital scrapbooking feature
I designed the UI for Moments, a feature built into Spotify that lets you attach personal memories to the songs you love, building a living scrapbook of your listening life over time.
Capture your moment
Tap the journal icon while a song is playing to save it as a Moment. Each entry captures not just the track, but the feeling it holds for you, becoming part of your personal scrapbook of listening history.
Make it your own
Capture a song's feeling in a scrapbook-like entry by highlighting lyrics, adding photos, jotting reflections, and decorating to preserve the moment and its emotions. Or tap Generate to let Spotify instantly turn your memories into a Moment using preset templates. You can share your Moments with friends, or keep your collection entirely private.
Grow your time capsule
Over time, your collection of Moments grows into a small time capsule of all the songs and memories you have chosen to hold onto, a personal soundtrack telling the story of who you are.
Relive the Moment
Every six months, Spotify Moments creates a personalized recap featuring selected memories from the Moments you saved. As you tap through, songs play in the background, taking you back in time.
Watch the experience come to life.
👩🏻💻 What I've learned
Working within a five day design sprint taught me how to move quickly without losing intentionality. Every design decision had to be grounded in research because there was no time to second guess. I also learned how important it is to design for emotion, not just function. Spotify Moments only works if it feels personal, and that pushed me to think more deeply about how UI can hold something as invisible as a memory.
