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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[leoals]

It kisses donkey ass!

[leoals]

Spotify don't care. They just want to maximize profits at any cost, including at the user's expense by making the software worse. The only language these guys understand is money. So you want to see change? Then we must not give them our money. Believe me, then they will listen.

[rlzed]

There definitely is no shortage of dissatisfied comments regarding the recent changes.

But I was thinking "Where are all the happy users that Spotify consulted with in the design phase of this project?"
Where are the masses of people saying "Yes this is what we said we wanted, thank you so much".

Then after reading the engineering document again I came to the conclusion ;
There aren't any. And a key realization is Spotify never actually claims these changes are based on what users have 'said they wanted'.

Sure they say their engineers and virtual teams did 'research'.
But this could be in a 'hands off' way just using AI tools, stats, user data metrics etc.
Never truly interacting with humans to find out what was required.

So in essence perhaps Spotify has done what it claims.
And as they have clearly demonstrated with the objective being internally driven.
Reusability, Unification, Speed and lastly (but seemingly forgotten) Satisfaction.

They say ;
"We’ve conducted extensive user research and run continuous tests over the past year that have informed us of the direction we should take.

That doesn't indicate that the users were actually consulted before development.
"research and run continuous tests" could be scripts collecting data on user behavior.

But as a lot of us know - automation is fraught with potential blind spots. Garbage in - garbage out.

Their next statement could be applied retrospectively I guess - once changes were done ;
"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."

Again I'm sure all these 'feedback' messages are being seen by someone at Spotify. Perhaps one or more of the 'virtual teams'.
But they don't actually promise to do anything about it - other than look closely at it.

And then there were the ambushed beta users (can't say testers as they really were neither consulted or listened to).
But even the mountains of feedback they provided seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
Perhaps deafend by the sound of the steamroller relentlessly pushing the project through.

And yet there was/is a lot of hype about building what the users want... marketing spin perhaps.

But what is the point of all the marketing if the outcome sees paying customers and advertising revenue being depleted as more and more people pursue the competition?

So... yes maybe we are all thinking that Spotify is listening to us... but in space (Spotify space) no one can hear you scream...

[zombieman81]

Oh! Yuck!!!!!

The playlist columns are just WRONG!

The new UI feels far too cramped with the artist listed in small print under the title... If it's your playlist the artist is MUCH more important than the album the track comes from IMHO...

It feels like the function of the "what friends are listening to" is less useful - after the app updated I got just a range of icons at the right (I had it turned off on the computer I use as background music for work due to limited space) and it looks like you only get details if you click on it now? On this computer going to turn it back off again (respect my settings darn it!)

There's also a big usability problem it appears... I see a "..." menu on a playlist but depending on the position of this icon the menu isn't guaranteed to fit on screen... I gather that's where the option to make a playlist available offline is now hidden??? That was so accessible before...

VERY VERY LOW SATISFACTION RATING.... Makes me want to reach for my system backup from a few months ago...

[cadabra]

For years I've been able to drag an album from the main window into a playlist folder and have it create a new playlist of that album, so I can come back and check it out later. I do this A LOT, it's one of the main ways I use Spotify, but it no longer works on the new desktop client. Yet another feature Spotify has removed in the "improved" new client. What an absolute fluster cluck of an update.