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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[MattSuda]

Hey everyone,

There is a new FAQ article that answers some questions from the comments here

Check it out: FAQ: The New Spotify App for PC and Mac

Note: I do not work at Spotify. I am a user that volunteers my time in the community to help other users. I have added this to clear up the confusion. 

[tpmullens]

There is so much wrong with this redesign, but the biggest issue in my eyes is that it now takes many clicks to get to pages that used to be so simple to access.

Also why do I now have to click onto a Search page instead of there always being a search bar present? Why are artist bios and offers now at the very bottom of their page? It's almost as if Spotify is trying to make it hard to discover new artists/music.

Overall, I feel like the design also made everything huge for no reason!

[Other_Self]

>FAQ for new app

Imagine making the app so user unfriendly and unintuitive that you have to roll out a FAQ page for it. What a joke.

[Other_Self]

Oh my, this FAQ is another big lie.

1) Why did the design change in the first place?

"...so we can continue providing you with the best listening experience possible, all the while expanding user accessibility and design functionality. "

Lie.

3) Where to find the Made for You section?

4) Where has my Discover Weekly gone?

You made the app so unusable so you had to make a FAQ page for it so people can go to google to find out where their personalized playlists are now. Is this a late april's fool joke?

5) Why was the Search bar moved?

"This change was made as part of our efforts to improve accessibility and functionality, so that the app is more in line with what users have come to expect from Spotify.  We've made sure that this change did not lead to an increase in the number of actions a user makes when searching as previously a click was needed to activate the search bar."

Lie.

6) How can I sort my playlists by date added from oldest to newest?

"If you have the app minimized, you can expand it until the Date Added column appears."

I have 21.5" monitor, why would i ever want to maximize the app? Good job making so much empty space that now we have to maximize the app to see something useful.

7) How to sort playlists by Artist?

"In the playlist view, clicking on Title three times will switch to sorting by Artist name."

Are you trolling us or something? 

😎Where is the Discovered On section from the Artist page?

"This feature is currently not available, however we can confirm that it will be making a comeback! "

So you've removed a feature many people used on a daily basis and promising that you some time in the future will give us back? Shameless.

9) How do you see the complete song list from albums in an Artist's Discography?

"Although this is not currently an option, we've listened to your feedback and are actively working on bringing this feature back."

Lie. This is still "under consideration" in the related thread, not to mention that nobody ever asked you to change the view of artist's page to this ugly abomination.

10) What happened to the Artist's About section?

"This section was moved to the bottom of the Artist page and can now be reached by scrolling down."

Again, who asked for this? 

11) How to get theSpotify URI?

"You can bring up the option to copy a Spotify URI by holding down the Alt button on your keyboard while accessing the Share options."

So you just removed an entry in the context menu so we now have to google how to do something that we used to do through the context menu?

12) Where can I find my Local Files?

"The tracks you've imported can now be accessed via Your Library > Local Files, right next to your Liked Songs."

And yet again, who asked for this?

13) Where is the option to show unavailable (greyed out) songs?

"Unavailable songs are now shown by default, this is why the option was removed from the setting menu."

Who asked for this?

14) Will there be an option to see and play tracks I've liked from a performer's Artist page?

"This is also a feature that was requested by many of you."

If i get it right, it's not even a feature and we were able to do so since the dinosaurs walked this unholy land. Feel free to correct me if im wrong on this.

15) Can I get the old UI back?

"The old UI will stop receiving updates, fixes and support, so it's not something that's considered."

So you've made a complete unusable app and now you're forcing everyone to use this garbage. NIcely done.

@Mihail

@dan 

@Spotify Engineering

You're a big LIARS.

[rednblu]

Yes.  And it is very telling that there is no way to correct the misinformation in the FAQ.