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Read the Article: Viget Rewind: A Reimagining of Spotify Wrapped

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Viget Rewind: A Reimagining of Spotify Wrapped

Viget Rewind: A Reimagining of Spotify Wrapped

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[32] Megan Raden

[33]Megan Raden, Quantitative UX Researcher

Article Categories: [34] #News & Culture, [35] #Data & Analytics, [36] #Product

Posted on March 26, 2025

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We wanted to take the unique aspects of Spotify Wrapped—its personalized touch
and sense of community—and see what we could do with our Harvest time-tracking
data.

W e w a n t e d t o t a k e t h e u n i q u e a s p e c t s o f S p o t i f y W
r a p p e d — i t s p e r s o n a l i z e d t o u c h a n d s e n s e o f c o m
m u n i t y — a n d s e e w h a t w e c o u l d d o w i t h o u r H a r v e s t
t i m e - t r a c k i n g d a t a .

A Raccoon Sticky Note

As a data nerd and someone who listens to a lot of music, I always look forward
to Spotify Wrapped. Back in November of 2024, I was eagerly Googling the
estimated release date for Spotify Wrapped when I had the idea of extending the
concept of yearly personalized data to other parts of my life.  

Because Viget is an agency that works with clients, it's really important for
us to track our time. We need to know how much time we are spending on any
given day, for any one of our clients. And because we already track our time
for clients, we also track our time for internal projects and tasks. So every
year, we have a wealth of data on what anyone was working on throughout the
year.

We track our time in a tool called Harvest, and I thought, "What if we could
have a Harvest Wrapped?" We invest so much time into all of our client work and
various internal projects, how cool would it be to be reminded of what you
contributed to over the course of 12 months? So I wrote my idea down on a
raccoon sticky note to ensure I wouldn't forget to share it when it came time
to pitch ideas for our annual Pointless Palooza.

[eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ2Z3QtdmlnZXRjb20tYWxsLWFzc2V]
My raccoon shaped sticky note that I kept as a reminder for my Pointless
Palooza idea.

Pointless Palooza is our annual hackathon-style event where we try to build
something useful and/or fun in a limited amount of time. In mid-February, I
pitched my idea for Harvest Wrapped, and last week, in a 12-hour sprint across
2-ish days, our team got together to bring this to life. 

Repackage and Rewind

Compared to other kinds of data reports, Spotify Wrapped is unique. Most data
reports we produce or consume are focused on conveying information that is
immediately applicable or actionable. What makes Spotify Wrapped different is
that you can look at data simply because it’s fun, and get results specific to
you. While we do get a glimpse into our behaviors and preferences in a way that
is personal, Spotify Wrapped also creates a shared experience with other
Spotify users. 

We wanted to take these unique aspects of Spotify Wrapped—its personal touch
and sense of community—and see what we could do with our Harvest data.
Repackage the more technical and dry time-tracking data to let us rewind on
what our year looked like. 

Unlimited Ideas but Limited Time

Unlimited Ideas

At kickoff, we allowed our imaginations to run wild. We didn’t want to limit
ourselves too early, even though we knew that scope would be a major factor due
to the limited time available. We also anticipated that wrangling the Harvest
data might be challenging, but we decided to ignore that concern for the time
being and brainstormed a variety of interesting ideas. These included both the
visual elements—like animations—and the story we wanted the data to tell.

[eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ2Z3QtdmlnZXRjb20tYWxsLWFzc2V]
Our brainstorming Whimsical board that included ideas around visuals and
function.

We considered questions such as:

  • What kinds of metrics could we pull in?
  • What would the overall narrative of these metrics be?
  • What other metrics could we bring in?
  • How can we create a sense of community or shared experience?
  • How do we account for large differences in the data across individuals and
    roles?

Every employee at Viget does an annual review using data from Harvest so it was
important for us to create something separate from the annual review—something
more fun, with a stronger narrative structure. It should also provide insights
that wouldn't typically be included in an annual review.

Limited Time

After brainstorming, we started to narrow in on ideas that felt both within
scope and still captured some of the fun and narrative elements we envisioned.
We decided to create a narrative centered around seasonality. The plan was to:

  • Look at the different clients and projects an employee worked on each
    quarter and calculate the number of hours spent
  • Add seasonal, company-wide events to give a stronger sense of community and
    shared experience
  • Include individual highlights, such as an employee’s "Vigeversary" - the
    year they started at Viget

Once we settled on this approach, we divided into two groups:

 1. One group focused on implementation - how to structure and analyze the
    data, and build the application.
 2. The other group focused on design, copy, and narrative, working in Figma to
    bring those ideas to life.

UX & Branding: Meaningful metrics and seasonal lava lamp vibes

Now that we had an overall concept, it was time to think about the details! 

First was the visuals and branding for the concept. We explored how to create
seasonality without being too literal. Ambient gradients gave us enough
flexibility to create the right vibe quickly without taking the extra time for
custom illustrations, and we knew it would make for some fun potential
animations. Luckily our team developer already had a lava lamp orb animation in
his back pocket - kismet! We also quickly realized we wanted to move away from
words like “Harvest” and “Wrapped” - in the future, we could actually have data
beyond Harvest feeding into the experience. After a quick Slack brainstorm, we
settled on “Viget Rewind” instead to name our reflective experience. 

[eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ2Z3QtdmlnZXRjb20tYWxsLWFzc2V]
Backgrounds used in our prototype.

In parallel, we began to mock up a few rough wireframes with an actual team
member’s data and copy, before we could access the raw data itself. It didn’t
take long to gain some quick learnings about meaningful Harvest data:

  • There’s ample opportunity to provide “color” in copy alone to the
    prototype. We toyed with seasonal writing to suggest timing. 
  • The project name data didn’t always provide the right context. “2019-2026
    Support” isn’t a title that evokes lots of memory, so we needed to pair the
    client and project names to make this more meaningful.
  • Not every project type should be reported back. For example, sharing back
    PTO hours still seemed awkward and inappropriate, no matter what copy you
    put in.

Putting these together in a high-fidelity prototype in Figma made our initial
vision complete!

[eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ2Z3QtdmlnZXRjb20tYWxsLWFzc2V]
Some final screens from our figma prototype.

Building It

The first big question we had was, “How are we going to get the data out of
harvest, and into a format that shows the metrics we want?”  We looked into
using the Harvest API, but quickly realized that we might spend all our time
there. So instead, with the help of some of our brilliant Vigets, we used a
tool called [40]Hasura to set up a GraphQL endpoint over a slice of a data dump
from Harvest and set up a simple static app on a self-hosted instance of [41]
Dokku.

But… we quickly got blocked by the tooling and with our limited time frame
realized we needed to adopt a simpler approach. So we boiled everything down to
the barest minimum to fetch and transform our data. From there, we worked with 
[42]tidy.js to get the data structured in the way we needed, and built out the
visuals for a functional prototype. At the end of Pointless Palooza, we had a
prototype that could read in the raw data for any single individual, calculate
(some of) the necessary metrics, and show them across a couple of screens!

[eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ2Z3QtdmlnZXRjb20tYWxsLWFzc2V]
Nathan giving the Viget team a demo of our functional prototype.

With Another 12 Hours

We managed to accomplish a lot in 12 hours, but didn’t get the fully functional
prototype we had hoped we could build (though we knew that would be a long
shot). So what if the team had another 12 hours? Or another 24? Where would we
take this project next?

We could:

  • Add in more metrics to show you how you spent your year at Viget.
  • Create dynamic animations and chart visuals that convey scale.
  • Conduct more advanced analyses that explore things like connections with
    peers (e.g., who did you work with the most?) or comparisons across Viget.
  • Include additional data sources into the experience, like Slack data or
    blog data (e.g., number of articles published and GA4 data). 
  • Consider other staffing cases, like biz dev, strategy and people team.

There’s a lot more that we could do with Viget Rewind and I hope that in the
coming months, we will have a chance to work on this project again. But even if
we don’t, what we’ve already created is a testament to our existing skills and
willingness to learn and try new things. Here’s to looking forward to the next
Pointless project!

[43] Megan Raden

[44]Megan is a Quantitative UX Researcher working remotely from Mississippi.
She specializes in helping others understand the what and the why of
human-computer interaction.

[45]More articles by Megan

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