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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

2,290 Comments
MayhemMike

Today was my turn to get the update and I don't like it either. 

The playlists take up a lot more space and they are under Library as well. Redundant double information. Meanwhile my go to feature the "made for you" stuff is now under "home" below a useless lists of random playlists (again my playlists?, 3rd time), podcasts I rarely/never listen to and random daily mixes without a description. eg "Daily Mix 4" + random album art. No idea what it is about.

 

"Recently played" is just a list of playlists? No way to see which songs you have actually listened to?

 

Followed playlists are sort of greyed out in the list view? This color language usually indicates that these items are disabled or not available. Misleading.

Album names get their own column but the more important artist gets tugged away under the song name? 

"Hardware acceleration" is under "View"?

 

Not sure why this redesign was really necessary, it's just a frontend skin that should be decoupled from any logic anyway. Why not expose some interfaces and let us make our own skins? Would be a win-win for both sides. 

olemanriver

One more (negative) comment on playlists.  Dragging and droppping songs in bulk and/or adding songs in bulk via the "right click" function to playlists is extremely buggy.  Sometimes songs make it to the other playlist, many times they don't.  Have to constantly audit and work back and forth to see if something moved properly.  

 

Add the aforementioned inefficiencies due to the cut and paste functionality disappearing (cut and paste to specific places in a playlist) and you've now created a very frustrating desktop app for power users that like to organize their music in various ways.

m6arate

I have the following challenges with the new UI:

1) The "Albums" link to my library is missing from the sidebar. It takes an extra 2 clicks because the "Your Library" page shows playlists by default, which I do not use. I would disable playlists feature from the app entirely if given the option, since I listen to albums.

2) Text and icons are too large and make it awkward to navigate, even on a large screen. I would prefer a compact mode that is a columnar list like the old itunes library.

3) The search bar is not present at the top of the page.

4) On the artist overview page, the album discography is displayed out of order by release date. Seeing all albums takes an extra click now.

5) The "Discover" section is still located only on the search page. I would like the option to pin that to the sidebar.

 

Are there plans to address any of the above?

ryanreecebrown

Sort by recently added feature is gone in new update. Anyone else with same problem? Super bummed about this, makes me not want to use the app anymore

ja_cob_s

This update is bad. Real bad. I'm not going to list all the reasons why because there are posted dated 2 weeks ago that detail all the problems with it, but you didn't listen to them so why would you listen to me?