Android Client design getting worse with each iteration.

[MrSkoda]

On my android client I used to be one press away from getting to my playlists, and once there I could easily find the ones that were downloaded and ready to go.

Now my home screen has four sections:

1. A 'recently listened to', which mysteriously lists nothing that I've listened too recently (a pumping iron playlist? I don't pump)

2. A section containing 'Top Lists', 'New Releases' and 'Discover', all of which contain nothing I'm interested in whilst on mobile

3. #Midweekmornings whatever that is

4. 'Genre's and Moods' which appears to contain the lowest common denominator of generic music that loosely fit things like 'mood' or 'club'

   To get to 'my music', which would seem to me to be core to your service, I have to press the button top left, then select 'my music'.

   Once there my downloaded playlists are no longer grouped at the top, I have to scroll through my extensive list of playlists to find something I want to listen to.

   Who decides on these changes? Was there a meeting where someone said 'I know, lets make it more difficult find the music that people have already spent time selecting and arranging?' and then someone else agreed that this was a good idea.

   Let me put to you a case study that I suspect is now being repeated across your userbase.

   I pay for Premium, the whole reason being that I like the offline play back on my phone, for the very reason that I can play music whilst on the move and don't have to download large music files on my limited and expensive 3G connection, what that means is that on my mobile device what I am interested in from spotify is being able to play the music it has already downloaded, not discovering new music which then has to download at low quality.

   What happens in the morning now is that I start spotify up as I sit in my car and start the engine, I don't have any music playing til I'm able to sort everything out as I get to the first set of traffic lights. 

   What used to happen was that in the morning I start spotify up as I sit in my car and start the engine and I had music playing as I reached the end of my drive way.

   Perhaps I need to be more organised and leave the house 5 minutes earlier but what I'm actually saying is that the Android spotify client has become less functional than it used to be and each time you take a feature away it sours the experience of your users.

   And don't get me started on the desktop player : 

• http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/Add-back-ability-to-see-some-playlist-followers/idi-p/...
• http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/Bring-Back-Sorting-in-Search-Results/idi-p/757011
  
• Not to mention the black on black on black interface that looks gorgeous until you actually try to use it.

Your interface design team(s) really really need to consider what they are doing as they are obviously (looking at these forums) burning through a chunk of the goodwill of your more vocal customer base.

As always the underlying service is still excellent.

[Joe]

Sounds like you have the new Home screen which sounds pretty cool. I expect that the information shown there will become more relevants with time.

Regarding offline playlists, there were complaints when they apeared at the top so I guess this was addressed. You should have a filter icon at the top right of the screen which will enable you to display offline content only. This works in all of the Your Music views and is an improvement on the way it was before, in my view.

[Rialas]

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@jwylot wrote:

Regarding offline playlists, there were complaints when they apeared at the top so I guess this was addressed. You should have a filter icon at the top right of the screen which will enable you to display offline content only. This works in all of the Your Music views and is an improvement on the way it was before, in my view.

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Thanks for that. That indeed is useful.

Annoying that there was no "how to" manuals to help us discover these functions.