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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[Rob-Cooper]

I have updated to the new interface today (think it's version 1.1.55.498.gfa83cg0-a - catchy!) and concur it's not good. A lot of features I enjoyed have gone and it's incredibly slow and clunky. Please provide the option to roll back to a previous version. Flaws in this version:

Incredibly slow to move around, posisbly due to all the large graphics.
When saving an album as a playlist it just saves the name of the album, not the artist. This isn't good, I want to scroll through bands, not album titles that are meaningless.
As mentioned above, now if I notice someone has a new album I seem to need to click through 3 or 4 very slow pages to be able to add it to my library, it's incredibly slow going through each.
I am a completist and used to like scrolling down through an artists back catalogue and picking out albums in chronological order. Not just have the albums being pushed by whatever algorithm you think I need.

I really don't understand how these changes get through. Spotify should be a database for music lovers to explore and experience the music they want to listen to. This isn't good and makes the spotify interface far far worse.

[Rob-Cooper]

also don't seem to be able to drag and drop my playlists into a new order. Unsure if this is new "functionality" or just an outcome of the entire interface being so slow and clunky.

[bangtanboy]

Here are my thoughts on the new update on the desktop app.

• The icons use a lot of space.
• The downloading icon is annoying to look at especially when you have a whole playlist downloaded. (it uses too much space).
• It's nice that you can see your friends' activity but it would be nice if you could hide it when minimized because it uses a lot of space. (the customers should be able to hide it by choice).
• The playlist icons should also be hidden by choice or at least smaller and not in your face.

It reminds me too much of the app on the phone with is not great because the desktop before had its own originality and vibe and was much easier to use than now because of its functions.

The only thing I did like was how you could see your friends' activity when minimized on the desktop but it could be too much and would be much more preferable if you could hide it from time to time. And also less text. The album is not important and I wish users could be able to hide the album so it only shows song and artist and when added (except for when minimized). The downloaded icon on each song that is downloaded uses too much space. It would be nice if it was gone.

[CeramicCash]

They desperately NEED new UX designers and new devs at Spotify! the standard of quality and decisions being made are so poor its painful to watch. Who is genuinely in charge of this mess? they should be sacked. at the end of the day Spotify will be better off for it.. Stop ignoring all features or optimisation for Apple users. 

[Rob-Cooper]

This update is a mess. I agree with so many user comments above. It's taking me several minutes to navigate around, so many images to load on each page, why is the artist name less important than song name or album name? Why can't I see the date I added a playlist. Why can't I view a whole artist discography anymore. Why is it so hard to drag and drop playlists.

Been with Spotify since the start and use the app everyday but can't see how I can persevere with this unless wholesale changes are made. This is awful.