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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[matttsku]

This new design hurts my eyes. Like, literally. I am getting a headache staring at this new design.

And this is after playing around with it, not just an initial reaction, but in seriousness I am unable to look at the desktop app for longer than a moment.

There are too many elements, and some of the elements don't really play well together. The left column with the list of your playlists, which is white text on pitch black surface seems like it is from a different universe (that universe is the past app design) than the right side (aka the 'mobile cool', but not all functional) that has a soft black background with tones melting from the header pictures. I find especially the very dark grey, near black, boxes between an album art and the black background on artist pages very uneasy to the eye. They serve no purpose, it just creates unnecessary background noise.

It is important to notice that these features that do not work are not a part of the visual appearance of the mobile app, where we have just soft tones and no extra black boxes around albums. The smoothness of the mobile visual design is not transferred to the desktop with this update, but it is just added on some patches, creating an uneasy mess.

As someone in this thread smartly pointed out Spotify is like a database. And with so much information you really need to mind how many elements you can comfortably fit in the visual layer on top of it before what you have created is simply chaos. If not chaotic, this updated desktop appearance is extremely miscellaneous.

Some of the visual choices made do not seem justified. I understand the wish to streamline the mobile and desktop experiences where appropriate, but it is just bad design to not take into account what functions for the display and usage properties of the device you’re designing for. It seems to me that the current visual appearance is a mitch-match of compromises, of the past and the mobile designs and is built on quick fixes instead of designing for the desktop specifically. This has led to the users missing on a coherent visual desktop experience that would support and enhance the listening, playlist creating and skimming artists' discographies, using the app basically.

____

And this is just to leave a comment on the visual execution of this update. Many have left extremely insightful and in-depth comments about the issues of functionality of this update. I notice some of the issues brought up on the first pages have been fixed by now. I hope that the visual execution will be reconsidered too and given the resources needed to build a functioning outlook for a desktop application (it requires more than moving visuals from a mobile app and quick fixing the rest as you go).

[EsWi]

I have been reading up on the engineering post, but I am not impressed (and still  tad enraged so bare with me).
If this is the way to do damage control on recent issues you are doing a bad job.

Let us ‘evaluate’ your self-called success shall we.

2. unification.
"...Thus, having one set of components that service multiple clients ensures that we can implement designs more thoroughly, thereby improving our users’ experiences."

Well OK, so if this is needed technically, fine but then you had to make sure to investigate the needs of all of your users before rolling out the update. You did investigate but never listened, neither implemented the user needed options.

"The result is a more consistent experience when users switch between mobile and desktop, as well as a more modern, contemporary, accessible, and user-oriented experience for everyone."

Well, yes you did make 'desktop' more 'mobile' and ruining the whole desktop user experience with it. It is simply not-user-oriented by taking away a lot of options people actually use!

3. Speed
“The architecture we chose had unexpected benefits in terms of making UI coding simpler and easier to understand as developers, and so we are hopeful this platform is going to be a solid foundation for us to build on in the years to come.”

Great, so why are your developers not able to maintain a solid ‘power user’ experience on desktop if this was so easy?

4. Satisfaction: Meeting Desktop and Web Player user needs
“The new experience has been developed with Spotify users in mind — both existing Desktop power users, and new users coming from the mobile app or completely new to the Spotify ecosystem”.

I am not sure which ‘mind’ was at work here, but it clearly did not involve your current paying users.

“From the very beginning, we’ve been evaluating and testing our progress at each step to make sure we deliver an experience that fulfils our users’ needs.”

How are you able to state this when this is clearly NOT the case.
No, you did NOT deliver that which full fills the user’s needs, you probably got the wrong reports or something but reading this topic alone should make clear this is NOT the case.

“We are looking closely at the feedback received and are continuously shaping the application to satisfy users’ needs. The new architecture lets us move faster, and users can expect the client to evolve more quickly than ever before.”

So, to sum it up, you made the decision to toll out a mobile version to the ‘power-users’, with a few tweaks to keep them on the brink of stopping paying for your services and now you are going to post react and bring back certain options? That is one of the worst managers speak design idea’s ever.
How can you even come to such a decision in the first place.

What does all this mean for you as a user?
“As a music listener using the Spotify Desktop client or Web Player, we hope it feels like a fresh new experience, but with all the features you use and love still there.”

Who wrote this article? Seriously, the person who wrote this article clearly does not understand the changes made to the desktop environment. No, the options we all loved are gone, taken away, and now we got to beg for them to come back if they are ever. Come on…

“The launch of the new Desktop, for us, is not the end. It’s just a new beginning for the app that started everything here at Spotify.”
Great, so this started everything… but breaking it down simply because people will throw their money at you every month anyways is not the issue here. It is baffling to read this and the see how bad Spotify is in recognizing the needs of their users and their needs.

I just can't continue reading this and not shaking my head in disgust over how you are treating you loyal paying customers. It's awfull, all I can say. I hope for improvement in a week or so but if it's not yet fixed I will cancel my ongoing subscription until resolved or Spotify gets their heads out of their backsides and DO start meeting user requirements. With the new and improved system in place cooking up a working power user enviroment shouldnt take that long as the engineers state in their post.

[daddsy]

Glad to see the discography lists are expected to return - shame these were removed as it's made the interface a lot less useable.

It generally feels less user friendly, although I'm sure I'll get used to most things, but if it's possible to arrange song title/artist/album in playlists a bit better that would be nice - it feels wrong at the minute and when I want to see more by an artist I keep clicking album title instead.

[zenubio]

PLEASE restore the ability to "Like" a song in full screen mode as well as add it to another playlist!

[zusman12]

removing the artist column and forcing it under the name of the song is frustrating. This causes accidental clicks on the artist's name instead of on the song.