article The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button in Community Blog

[iOS][Playlists] Keep like button multi-functional

Austin05 — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 16:20:58 GMT

Personally, when I like a song, I also add it to a certain playlist with all of my newly liked songs. It’s tedious to press the 3 dots at the top right, then click add to playlist, then click the playlist I would like to add it to. Every. Time. I know this isn’t an issue for most, but it’s very tedious for me, especially when I’m listening to music and driving.

If you could make it so once you like a song, you can press the like button again and it opens a playlist selection screen, including the “Liked Music” playlist so you can unlike it if you accidentally liked it. This should probably also show the playlists that the song is currently in. This would also make it easier to remove songs from playlists.

Also, another *possible* addition would be to have a small pop up or text box that explains you can use the like button to add music to playlists.

A benefit of this change is that people like me, who add all newly liked music to a playlist, don’t have a headache.

A possible downside to this change would be that if someone wants to unlike a song (which in my experience is rare) they have to make two extra screen presses.

If this change were made on both PC and mobile, I could see how many people would appreciate it.

The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

MattSuda — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 12:32:24 GMT

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

jovem1 — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 15:35:09 GMT

why do you bother making feedback threads if you're going to continue making awful changes that more than half the user responses don't want? are you serious? i understand that your design teams (or whoever manages these awful changes) needs to actually change something in order to keep your jobs and prove you're working, but how about you fix something that needs fixing then - such as playlists no longer repeating automatically, an issue that's been around for months and many updates. you have hundreds of threads to sort through and take actual, USER-BASED suggestions from. but yes, by all means continue confusing the casual customers of this app and driving them away onto other platforms. if i didn't have a duo plan with someone else i would have already cancelled and moved onto the service that came with my phone. who doesn't just love when the app that is supposed to be simple and intuitive is constantly made worse by the dumbest updates imaginable

in the initial feedback thread some of your most long term customers said that this change was unwanted and overall UNNECESSARY and you went ahead with it anyway. definitely just keep making spotify worse and harder to use. i can't believe i'm paying to be a guinea pig for these god awful "design tests"

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

jovem1 — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 15:46:25 GMT

while you're at it, i just can't wait for you to inevitably re-implement that ugly, ridiculous "now playing" interface where the song title was for some reason AT THE TOP OF THE SCREEN, where NO ONE is naturally glancing to, and the sleep timer that no one uses was in the middle of the screen. i'm starting to think your design team is genuinely made up of aliens studying human behaviour and making the most ridiculous guesses as to what we want to see in this app. i hope whoever is finalizing these pointless changes (instead of fixing what actually needs fixing) loses their job and can never work in user design again

i've been on spotify for years and hit almost 150k listening minutes last year. but if i have to go through one more of these awful design tests i'm moving to another platform for good. who do i look like to be paying for this ridiculous**bleep** to be blasted all over my listening experience without permission

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

handymonkey — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 15:50:29 GMT

“The ability to see which songs you've previously liked will return to track listings soon. (Playlist and Album pages) We don't know yet if this icon will still be a green heart. The team is currently working on making this experience better.”

So you’re taking away functionality that the majority of all these commenters wanted, and have wanted, in each post this discussion has come up in. Well, the team has currently made the user experience MUCH WORSE, so working on making it better is the only choice they have. Thanks for making me an Apple Music subscriber.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

BabyEcho0_YT — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 16:23:44 GMT

@jovem1 it is official that the heart is a plus sign so all of this back and forth argument can stop and if you don't like it you can switch to the computer version and don't have to deal with the Confusion of the plus sign and hey i been in a the situation where i almost deleted my account and stop being on spotify because people started saying rude stuff on my idea but i got over it and ignored those people and moved on and keep my focus on helping people like you, and you can do the same thing by ignoring the fact the heart is a plus sign now and move on to a different path in the spotify community(EX: help people out and try the best you can, create new ideas that will be good for the spotify web player(if you put an idea for changing the plus sign to the heart again it will get closed)

if this post is helpful hit the "Accept as Solution".

If you appreciate my answer, maybe give me a Like. follow my spotify? and community account here

and if you want a different kind of spotify offline head here and it will be poston the idea submissions when they look through the ideas. keep up the good work!

Note: I'm not a Spotify employee.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

jovem1 — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 16:26:06 GMT

No, I pay monthly to use this service and I'm going to comment if they keep making useless changes. They're asking for feedback and I'm giving feedback, as did the 100s of people in the other thread that were ignored. If you want to just accept that things are "finalized" then you can go ahead and let yourself be steamrolled by the wishes of the company you are GIVING YOUR MONEY TO, for some weird reason, but that is not what I want to do. We are the customers and our opinions are supposed to matter, hence why they bother making these threads in the first place (even if they are hard-pressed to take the suggestions they get).

It's not my job to lurk the forums and try to clean up their messes. There are people at Spotify being paid to do that and they should be doing their jobs.

I am the consumer, I deserve to have an easy listening experience, and I have the right to put my perspective out there when they make changes that don't contribute to that goal. That is the purpose of forums and feedback.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

MattSuda — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 16:56:52 GMT

Fun Fact for those tracking history:

The (+) Plus icon is actually what the button used to be before the Heart icon, several years ago. This is pretty much going back to that.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

jovem1 — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 16:43:29 GMT

if we're aiming for a real throwback we could just start pirating music and stop giving our wages to companies like this. with the way things are going now, using youtube-to-mp3-converter to rip all my albums is about as convenient as using spotify

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

kaworu_bloodpaw — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 18:08:32 GMT

@MattSuda

Haha I knew it! Wasn't it a checkmark at one point too? Sometime between like 2015-'16?

Also, great post! It's all very clear and descriptive.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

MattSuda — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 19:38:44 GMT

@kaworu_bloodpaw

Thank you! 🙂

It worked similar several years ago to how it will now (expect the adding to other playlists too part) when you hit the plus icon it turned into a check icon.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

thezapperer — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 18:23:27 GMT

Give the heart button back, the plus is such a worse experience. It doesn't matter that it only adds two extra clicks. The way a lot of people use spotify is as follows-

1. Hear new song on discover weekly or radio while doing something else, like driving.

2. Click the heart.

3. Continue listening/going about their business.

4. Later on, when they're ready to organize their music, they move songs from "liked" to more specific playlists. If they don't like the song, they simply like the heart again.

I don't want to add more clicks to this. I just want to click one thing that is the simplest way to visualize a "like" which is a heart. We literally can say "I ❤️ you" instead of "I like/love you" because a heart is the fastest way to symbolically convey 'like'. My "liked" playlist isn't a playlist so much as it is a big storage bin for later organization, and a place I can just hear every song I've ever enjoyed on spotify. Beyond that, the heart symbol just has a certain feeling to it. It makes me glad to see it. That's some kind of subconscious thing, but it definitely adds to the experience, even if it's subtle.

A plus/check does not convey the same idea. I went to check the liked status of a song and was confused by the check. The only place most people have seen a checkmark is on twitter, where it is used to denote verified/official accounts. So I saw the artist name with a check next to it and thought, "huh, guess artists are verified now? but where is the like button? it took me a minute to figure out what had happened. Sure, it only adds two more clicks. But I like spotify because it's so FAST and EASY to use. I can easily click the heart icon when I'm doing something else. It's a large easy target to hit. I don't want to mess around with scrolling and menus when I'm busy doing something else. I don't care if the "liked" section is the default playlist to add things to. I don't want to click other things. I'm cooking or folding laundry or doing homework. I don't want to open my phone, click a plus, click liked, click done. I don't want to fatfinger and add it to another playlist by mistake. If I realize I don't actually want to keep the song in my liked, I could just click the heart again. You've turned a 2 click series into 6 clicks for literally no reason.

It's insane, because you FINALLY perfected the driving view. The driving view is perfect, it has everything I want to see big and easy and accessible. It stays open so I can easily and safely navigate. Never touch that again. It's a mature, perfect design.

I already have an iphone. I love spotify, but this is such an obnoxious change that I will switch to apple music out of spite. There are freely available tools to transfer out all my playlists, it'd take maybe an hour to switch over. I actually made an account here to beg for this to be reverted. PLEASE bring the heart back, or figure out another way to let me add a song to my liked with one touch.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

thezapperer — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 18:27:48 GMT

@MattSuda

@kaworu_bloodpaw

Cool bit of history! Let's leave it there :^) No reason to revert a change that happened like 7 to 8 years ago when people are so clearly happy the way things are now. There was no reason to do this. They probably changed to the heart from the check initially because it tested well in beta.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

Hubo — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 18:35:23 GMT

Thanks for the run-down Matt! 👌

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

BabyEcho0_YT — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 18:39:23 GMT

i will try to get used to the plus sign but i will still will still use my computer with the heart thanks matt

if this post is helpful hit the "Accept as Solution".

If you appreciate my answer, maybe give me a Like. follow my spotify? and community account here

and if you want a different kind of spotify offline head here and it will be poston the idea submissions when they look through the ideas. keep up the good work!

Note: I'm not a Spotify employee.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

BabyEcho0_YT — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 18:56:14 GMT

@MattSuda

what do you guys use to make your videos so i can start editing for my brother

if this post is helpful hit the "Accept as Solution".

If you appreciate my answer, maybe give me a Like. follow my spotify? and community account here

and if you want a different kind of spotify offline head here and it will be poston the idea submissions when they look through the ideas. keep up the good work!

Note: I'm not a Spotify employee.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

asfaraseyescansee — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 19:38:39 GMT

I ended up on this forum while trying to come on to complain about the new single-stream scroll setup of the home page, and this is the page that Spotify Help linked in relation to that issue. The issue of heart/plus has no relation to the new constraints placed on each person's algorithmic choices and is purely a cosmetic change. Seriously how long did you guys spend redesigning the like animation to a plus/check when you could have added a dislike button instead? and all the while our actual choices from the moment we open the app have been greatly reduced. Please stop confining your users to what you think the algorithm should look like and instead, give us more choices instead of less. There are a dozen ways I can think of to allow for more user freedom on this platform, which would continue growing the diversity and quantity of music that is supportable on this application rather than gatekeeping it and forcing people to click on the first shiny thing that they see. Irresponsible and anti-democratic.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

kaworu_bloodpaw — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 19:40:25 GMT

Hey @asfaraseyescansee

You can provide feedback on the new home screen UI design in this thread.

I believe it has not been finalized.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

asfaraseyescansee — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 19:42:58 GMT

@kaworu_bloodpaw Thanks for the information! I'll repost something similar there.

Re: The ♡ Heart button is being replaced with a (+) Plus button

pjtaylor49 — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 19:46:10 GMT

What a shame that feedback was ignored and you are proceeding with the change anyway with no way of users to keep the heart. I will be switching to Apple Music once it hits my phone.