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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[josedest]

And you cannot see which items are already in the library when scooping through the discography. Really good job mates. Did blind monkeys do the UX testing?

[Woode]

I know how hard these UI framework refreshes are to implement, and  how set-in-stone these designs are by the time they're released, so let me start by congratulating the team(s) on their release. Objectively, this feels like a regression in usability.

• Text feels slightly smaller by like, 1-2pt - this is most noticeable at 100% DPI and is a bit uncomfortable
• A lot of empty space and no way to condense it or make text bigger - with a web-based UI styling, I kind of expected to be able some flexibility for accessibility purposes and personal preference
• There is no Made For You shortcut to quickly locate curated mixes, Release Radar, and Discover Weekly
• The Search bar is not visible at all times, so I cannot trigger a search without navigating to a different pivot - I really liked seeing my last query at a glance to inspire my next search. And, while I did like having it on the right, it seems like there is enough space in the top UI alongside my Account Name and e.g. Private Session badges to make the Search bar full-width. It just looks so barren up there - let me pin it open!
• The song list is not responsive enough and still makes poor use of ultrawide displays (21+:9), leaving huge gaps between each column and truncated longer titles; for vertical-orientation displays (9:16), it seems like a lot of padding can be lost to make more text visible, as there is a lot of field truncation at narrow widths - this is also somewhat true of the iOS app with the new layout, lots of "essential" padding at the expense of viewable text.
• The floating Social tab at smaller sizes is not useful in its collapsed form - it only shows me friend photos - I really only want to know songs or it's not worth displaying, and could be collapsed further. The Social tab is something I glance at casually to explore something that sounds interesting - if I have to consciously interact with it, it's lost value.
• Cannot view the full song list of an artist from their Artist page anymore, just Albums - this is slows down searching an entire artist's collection, it was valuable to have the "master list" by album
• Maybe a bug, maybe a necessity - the Spotify cache directory was reset to %APPDATA% - not great for smaller boot drives with external storage, and the old cache was just chilling on my other drive taking up space.

Thanks again. The service remains useful, but where I used to reserve a corner of my desktop or an entire display for keeping Spotify open, it's not quite pleasant enough an experience now to warrant frequent interaction, and will remain minimized when not in use.

[benpitt7]

Very unhappy with the new UI.

The fact that the Artist tab in My Library links away from My Library and to the artist page is a major loss, as this is the main way I sort and search my music. This change alone would likely be enough to drive me away from the platform, if it's left unfixed.

There are smaller issues as well, such as putting the artist names beneath the song rather than in a column to the right. This is limiting, since you can sort playlists by columns, but now Artist isn't a column...

Adding the functionality to sort tabs by "date added" is fine, though "Creator" feels like a particularly unintuitive name for the "alphabetical by artist" category.

For a platform all about sorting and cataloging your favorite music--removing key functions from the library seems like a pretty catastrophic oversight on the part of the development team. Hopefully you're able to heed some of the advice from me and others on this forum and adjust course quickly.

[robbygilson]

It now takes me sooooo looong to move one song to the top of my playlist because track list order management is bugged. When I select every track above the track I I'm trying to move up it doesn't select everything. The Functionality drop in this update is a big disappointment Spotify. What a let down. 

[Lazy_Vibes]

Why did you take away the ability to copy the Spotify URI link for a song or artist?

In the old version, we could copy song link OR song URI.

Noe the URi link is gone, and only song link is there !?!

Horrible update. Not usable at all.

Please give us back the old version