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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[thecarnival]

Yeesh, this is a bad update, I've spoken to at least 5 friends and we all hate it.

I've never considered leaving Spotify before but this might be bad enough to justify it.

[AxelMont]

I want to see which albums are singles and which ones are LPs on the artist page without going back and forth clicking every single album, is that so hard?

Sheesh, every day I keep using this app I realize more and more ways in which this update is a complete failure.

To be honest, I'd never thought I would have to reconsider my premium subscription for such an unnecessary screw-up.

[9yqmp8k12ttus7q]

there are so many problems with this. you have removed almost everything that makes the desktop app special.

- you can no longer copy/cut and paste songs within or between playlists??? are you kidding??? 

- when i follow new people, it no longer shows me what they are listening to (people i know to have their listening activity public) -- all i can see in the friend bar is a prompt to connect to facebook. 

- about artist section no longer shows playlists that the artist is featured on. it snows spotify official playlists, but not random users. this was a good way to find random users with good playlists. 

- ordering songs by artist is annoying, and in many cases i have been able to order by date added-oldest to newest but not newest to oldest -- this was a good way to see if playlists have been updated (particularly huge playlists that take ages to scroll down)

- why do you feel the need to increase the size of the text with every update? it's getting ridiculous

there are many more finnicky things i could mention but i'm fed up

[sarakham]

I looked for this specifically for a place where I could share my feedback with Spotify on the new UI. I like the cleaned up share & playlist options, but search is fundamentally broken now. It's not just mildly worse; it's borderline unusable:

1) Finding a song is now incredibly difficult (I had to result to Google today to find what I was looking for, THEN search in Spotify, whereas it always worked before)

2) You can't really navigate an artist's discography anymore. Dates are de-emphasized, and you have to click into every. single. album. Especially in this day and age of digital streaming, most people will remember a song more than what album it was in. Why make people search album by album??

3) The card-based UI is MUCH harder to navigate than the previous list-based UI. I don't think this a matter of familiarity. Take "Recent searches" as an example. They just blend into a sea of other cards for "Your top genres" (who cares about this?) and "Browse all" (again, who cares?). Because they're now cards, there isn't much room and the names get truncated, dates aren't even displayed, etc. It's like Spotify expects people to navigate primarily based off the thumbnail and the name/details secondarily. Odd and dysfunctional.

So two notable good things came from this update (cleaner share & playlist options) but did this really have to come at the expense of so much core, critical functionality?

[Kriisi]

I do understand that mobile is so big that it’s more effective to streamline every platform version with mobile UI, but the problem is that none of the mobile versions of Spotify have really been suitable for much else than just listening to playlists you had used the desktop version to create and maintain. Now it’s a bit like... well, imagine being forced to use a Mac with only an iOS user interface or Windows with just the Metro UI. Horrible.

So, fine, streamline with mobile, but make the mobile have the same functions as the desktop version, not vice versa.