The New Desktop App

[dan]

UPDATE - May 5th, 2023

Hey folks,

We appreciate the feedback you've provided us with regarding the new desktop UI; it's being taken into account!

We're chiming in to redirect you to the current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 

Thanks!

UPDATE - April 16th, 2021

Hey folks,

We've tried to cover most of the frequently asked questions concerning the new update in this Spotify Answer - Make sure to check it out!

We'll continue to go through all your posts in this blog, so if you have any other questions besides the ones in the FAQ, feel free to add them in a comment below.

Thanks,

The Community Moderator Team

UPDATE - April 8th, 2021

Hi Everyone,

Yesterday we published a blog post on our engineering blog which goes into more details on the new UI, the reasons behind it and the process of building it.  If you'd like to read a few more details like that you can check it out here.

I'd also like to mention a few things coming in upcoming versions of Desktop

• We're working on bringing back a list-like Discography view, something many of you have mentioned missing in the new UI.  We expect this to land in an upcoming release, so do watch this space and make sure you remain fully updated.
• "Discovered On" playlists for artists will be back in an upcoming release.
• We're working on bringing to Desktop the ability (like in our mobile apps) to see all the saved songs by a particular artist from within the artist page itself.  Again this will be arriving in an upcoming Desktop release.

Thanks,
Dan

ORIGINAL POST -----

Hi everyone

Dan here from the Desktop team again. I wanted to make another post to once again thank you all for your continued feedback, and also give a little more detail about what we’re doing from here on in.

In short, the new user interface is the future of the Spotify Desktop client, and over the coming weeks we’ll roll out the new UI to all Desktop users. Many of you will have noticed already, but we’ve based the new experience on the more modern and scalable Web Player codebase, and in doing so made both versions more aligned and easier to use than ever before.

Why are we making this change?

We believe in the future of the Desktop platform and want to make sure it can still serve the needs of our users now and into the future. 

The existing Desktop UI codebase became increasingly hard to maintain as time went on, and you may have noticed a growing gap between the Desktop and Mobile apps in some cases. For those of you interested in the technical details, a blog post on the engineering blog is coming soon. The short story, however, is that our desire to continue pushing Desktop forward and bringing new features to it became incompatible with the reality of maintaining the legacy experience.

Meanwhile, we had a Web Player serving similar user needs, but built in a much more modern and scalable way — with a more cohesive Spotify “look & feel”. We therefore resolved to use the Web Player UI code as the basis for both Web and Desktop in the future, and have been spending quite some bringing the Desktop-class features that you’ve come to expect to this shared platform. You’ve had a sneak peek of this as we’ve been testing and building things out, so once again I’d like to thank you for both being a part of it and giving great feedback on this thread that has definitely helped us improve.

Benefits of this approach

Firstly, I’d like to say that this really is a new beginning for the Desktop app. Long-term Desktop users will start to notice more rapid iteration on the app than they’ve seen in the past.

I’d like to call out some of the things in the new Desktop, and also give you a little taste of what’s to come.

Design - We’ve focused on consistency, are using more color to enhance the experience where appropriate, and are making better use of cover art and album images in the app. We're also better aligned to other platforms, put an increased focus on accessibility, interactions and animations, and have tightened up our design language, so it’s more in line with what users have come to expect from Spotify.

Functionality - We’ve brought the functionality that users expect from Desktop, like sorting/filtering, drag & drop, and advanced settings and options, whilst improving areas like playlist creation and curation, profile pages, and more. In many cases these improvements have landed in the Web Player, so the work here has benefited our combined users on both platforms.

Tip! You’ll also find new keyboard shortcuts for many tasks (press ctrl+? to see them) which makes certain actions much faster and easier for any user.

We are also aware that there are a few aspects raised in the community that haven't been fully addressed as part of this update, but items like the Search Bar and discography on artist pages have ultimately been brought closer in line with other Spotify applications. That said, we will continue to iterate on the experience across both platforms moving forward.

The future of Desktop

As mentioned above, this change to the Desktop UI gives us the ability to move faster in bringing you new improvements, features and functionality — so you can expect to see continued improvements to the client in the weeks and months to come.

Once again, I’d like to thank you all for helping us shape the Desktop App over the past year on behalf of everyone here at Spotify, and please do continue to post your feedback and use our Ideas section here in the Community to tell us what you’d like to see and why.

Thanks again,

Dan

[defnenuhoglu]

Yeni güncelleme gerçekten çok kötü. Hiç beğenmedim. Bilgisayarda dinlerken sol altta şarkının/podcastin kapağı büyük gözüküyordu ve boyutunuda ayarlayabiliyorduk şuan küçük, yazılar da küçük, boyutu ayarlayamıyoruz. Sağ tarafta arkadaşlarımızın dinlediği şarkıyı bu kadar büyük görmemize gerek yok bence. Sonuç olarak hiç bir şeyin boyunu, şeklini ayarlayamıyor olmamız çok kötü. Tek güzel olan şey 'BU AY EN ÇOK DİNLEDİĞİMİZ SANATÇILAR VE ŞARKILAR'. ESKİ HALİNE GERİ DÖNSÜN!!!!!

[Jeremy]

Hey there @Raxater and @RobMarr,

Thank you for your posts and feedback.

Can you let us know which version of the app you have?

We'll keep an eye out for your replies.

Take care!

[LawTurk]

Did you guys at least add album cover art to be displayed next to each song in one's playlist???  I'm copying a post made in 2013 requesting this change.  Please make this change.  After reading the comments about the new desktop app I think I'm going to hold off on updating to it.  I swear you guys are literally forcing people away from something that used to be awesome.  Apple music suck, but at least they have album cover art...  The 2013 post is below.  Don't get why this hasn't been done in 8 years...

View as Album List was a great feature. Based on comments I have seen on other forums, I am not the only one who thinks so. Please restore this feature.

Reasons:

1) Images are much easier to see than text. I have reached the age of reading glasses. Before this feature was removed, I could easily find songs / albums in playlists. Now I have to find my glasses beforehand!

2) Images are much more compelling and attractive than text. A picture tells a thousand words etc. The whole look and feel of Spotify is enhanced through the use of album images. Removing them seems like going against good user experience practice.

3) Nostalgia. Although I love Spotify and I firmly believe that subscription is the future of music, I still feel some nostalgia for "possessing" a collection of albums. Displaying album covers reinforces the feeling of having a collection of albums in a playlist.

Note that all three arguments apply equally to desktop and iPad versions of Spotify.

[LawTurk]

Nevermind, I see that you added album cover art.  Thank you for doing that!  However, I still agree with all of the other comments.  Please add back the Artist column and the Date Added column as I use those frequently to sort my playlists.  Also, completely agree that unknown artists are getting **bleep** by this update.  I've found so many amazing artist through the about tab and now that's gone too?  Please bring back! 

[TimonS]

Having used Spotify for a long time, the new UI is user unfriendly. Please change it back. Here are some of the Problems.

• You're a music library service... and you hid the search bar? There is absolutely no reason to have removed the search bar from it's permanent spot at the top of the window, and now searching new music is more annoying because it requires not only pageflipping, twice as many movements and clicks, for no reason.

• Replaced the search bar with a second play button that has no purpose. We have a play button at the bottom of the window with transport controls, why do we need two play buttons available? For what purpose?

• Why is discography RANDOM? Not sorted by release year (best method), not even sorted alphabetically, NOT even sorted as albums->EPs->singles. Nope, you just throw them in randomly. It takes NO EFFORT to make them sort chronologically, it is purely a benefit and there's no reason to have it randomly listed. Now you want it sorted chronologically? More mouse clicks and page flips needlessly.

• When you do select see all, you could have added a list view/tile view toggle, but instead we're locked to tile view which yet again requires more pageflips and more clicks, needlessly. A list view with collapsible/expandable albums (similar to the old UI) would be awesome! But you didn't do that, you made it worse.

• Full screen mode is bad. It's choppy as **bleep**, doesn't prominently feature album art (which is often shrunk into the corner) and the background images are greyed which, despite taking up the majority of the screen, takes them out of your attention (most pop-ups for settings or info on your phone or websites do this for a reason). This is conflicting to the way we naturally view things and makes full screen very unpleasant to look at.

• Moving artists to be under the song title in playlists makes it MUCH more difficult to identify both the songs and the artists quickly and easily. Furthermore, adding more clicks if you want to sort by artist, for no gain whatsoever.

• The queue button has largely been unaffected, except that if you switch between "queue" and "recently played", the queue button stops working and instead of returning to your playlist or previous menu, it just flips back between the queue and recently played until it returns to your previous page.

• Very small, removing playlist search bars in favor of an icon is just another needless change that wastes space. Computers have search bars, not search icons, they're more intuitive, leave them alone.

• Why have the "playlists" section on the left (Liked songs, Create Playlist) if you're going to remove the "Made for you" section, and don't have a section for stations?

• All this purposeless stuff, and still no ability to hide devices from Spotify Connect? You're too busy pushing politics on my home page to focus on useful features, huh? I came here to listen to music and relax, not see political**bleep** that I'm trying to get away from. It's no surprise that services like Qobuz or Tidal are growing while Spotify is stagnating.