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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[jdarrell]

Commenting once again to report a bug since I was added to this rollout.

Please add back the ability to make Spotify-created playlists public or private.  It was there before. Now it's not.

I consider it to be a bug because it removed the ability for us to control visibility of Spotify-created playlists (in particular those that are already public), which leaves many people's data in an inconsistent state (current state is impossible given the current functionality).

[jshatan]

With the new update, when I click "Share" I only get two options: "Copy Song link" or "Copy embed code" - no more Twitter, Messenger, etc. What gives?

[arielfmdp]

Yes gcc1908, of course it should ! I also wrote about that. But they aren't
listening to us, so....

[aewhelan]

After using the new UI for a few weeks now, I am back to provide an update. Spotify, I am so deeply and incredibly frustrated and disappointed with this update. I've already explained some of my biggest issues in a previous post (see: page 20) and I agree with what everyone else has brought to your attention as well, so I don't feel the need to type everything out again (especially when you have not responded to the community you're supposed to be serving).

Someone pointed out that this update was completely internally driven and fails to meet their four metrics of success for the project. After reading every post Spotify has released about the update and reading every page of comments on this thread, it is abundantly clear that the update was for the sake of ease for the team and nothing else. No concerns have been acknowledged and the "Desktop power users" have been entirely ignored.

In your engineering post, you wrote: "There were risks, of course. Desktop had (and has) many more users than Web Player, and Spotify’s Desktop client is the place most of Spotify’s “power users” call home. We knew we would have a lot of work to do to bring our Web Player up to those power users’ exacting standards." Spotify, I am writing to assure you that you have not brought the web player up to our standards and there are nearly 1000 comments on this post confirming that. If most of your customers are using the Desktop, then it would make sense to give extra attention to how we use the player, but for the sake of cutting out extra work for you, you have ignored a large portion of your user base. 

Truly, I'm all for making your code reusable and for making the design consistent. If you could do these things while still maintaining any amount of usability for your Desktop users, I would be thrilled. Instead, you have eliminated or hidden many of the features we found helpful (or necessary) for our listening, and replaced them with data, visuals, or music that clutters our apps and gets in the way of our Spotify experience. 

I am truly sad and disappointed to see Spotify brushing off their Desktop users like this and prioritizing their own ease over the needs of their users. I have found a few alternative music players that I will give a try. If nothing has improved in this UI in the next 2 months, I am planning on cancelling my long-time Premium membership until changes are made. I would love to continue being a part of this community and support Spotify, but this has truly ruined my experience with the brand and product. 

[arielfmdp]

I'm totally agree with aewhelan 

They weren't even kind enough to put a section for feedback in the app itself.

They totally and utterly ignored us, the main makers of the app. And now they must avoid the exodus of many of their premium users.