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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[Punky_John]

Hi All, I am still having issues with the playlist not syncing between desktop and ios. It tends to be 1 or 2 songs that have the discrepancy and when they are "dragged" from the bottom of the playlist.

This is hugely annoying.

Thanks

[AWOLtrooper]

This app still blows.

Thanks for making it unusable.

Thanks for labeling "singles" as "albums"

Thanks for 15 follow buttons nested right next to each other

Thanks for millions of wasted pixels of space when you stretch the stupid ui to full screen

Thanks for not actually knowing what people want in a real app.

Thanks for doing the bare minimum.

Thanks for forcing my podcast downloads to duplicate into a stupid EPISODES PLAYLIST

Thanks for being tools who don't care about your own software

I hate this. I hate all of it- you guys BLOW.

On the bright side its good to see you guys letting mentally challenged people do all the UI/UX coding (THAT must be the reason why everything sucks, right, not that competent human beings actually made this and think its good? Because it's not).

I'm sure it saves you money.

Oh, and thank you for giving me an easy reason to cancel my subscription.

[meadowcroftt]

I just had a disturbing experience in the new UI:

Bottom line up front:

a) cntl-v only inserts music at the end of the playlist, not the spot I selected

b) spotify deleted 100 of my songs - uncommanded by me

c) the left side of the UI greyed-out but still worked

Details of the experience: on an artist's page in the tracklist of an album, I selected all the tracks and typed cntl-c, thus copying the tracks to the clip board.  Then, I navigated to an existing playlist with 4000 songs in it.  I navigated to the middle of the playlist and clicked on the spot where I want to insert the songs.  (Like I've done a million times before in the old UI).  Then I typed cntl-v.  The songs did not appear in the middle of the playlist, but did appear at the end of the playlist.  I selected these songs appearing at the end of the playlist and right-clicked remove from playlist.  Then, I navigated to the middle of the playlist again to try again to insert them.  To my horror, 100 songs in the middle of the playlist had been deleted too.  I restored the 100 songs, song by song, all appearing at the bottom of the playlist and then dragged them back to the middle of the playlist.  I should add, during this search, select, add-to-playlist process, the entire left side of my UI turned grey.  But, I was able to continue anyway with the greyed out UI.  This took quite a while of dragging, since the dragging was over the range of 2000 other songs.  I completed the original objective and came over here to complain about my experience.  In short:

a) cntl-v only inserts music at the end of the playlist, not the spot I selected

b) spotify deleted 100 of my songs - uncommanded by me

c) the left side of the UI greyed-out but still worked

[Kriisi]

So... Is it possible that the Spotify suits saw the flustercuck that was Facebook desktop browser redesign and immediately thought they must have some of that sweeeet dumbed down action too? 

[gavin_davis]

Oh no, my Desktop app just updated to this and I despise almost everything about it.  I might just need some time to adjust, but there seems to be so many mis-steps that I'm sure that's going to be a struggle.

The navigation is appalling, I feel completely at sea.  Getting rid of list view and prioritising imagery in an effort to emulate iOS is a horrible idea.  If I want to listen to the latest single by an artist I now have to click on a thumbnail (which I accidentally scroll past all the time at the moment) and navigate into that singles page and play from there, but if I want to access other tracks by the artist, I now have to go back to the main artist page and navigate to each single or album individually, it's madness.  

You're also hiding the complete library by each artist, so you have to click 'SEE ALL' to see all of their music. Why would you hide an artist's discography on the artists page?  To rub salt into the wounds, you've prioritised Fans Also Like over that artist's complete discography, by pushing those thumbnails into the space where the complete discography could be sitting. 

Why on earth would you hide the search bar from me? It's completely pointless and makes finding music (one of your primary purposes) harder!

You've dropped the artist column in all playlists, so I can now no longer sort by artist! What possible reason could you have for that?  There's plenty of real estate to play with on the desktop app! I find it much harder to see and organise what's what because you've squished the names under the track titles. and again prioritised visual clutter.  This is Desktop, we don't need huge hit targets! 

You moved the like button onto the opposite side of the screen? I'm assuming this is mainly to accommodate these pointless thumbnails you're forcing on us.

This is a horrible horrible mis-step. I hope your UX/UI team look through all the comments here and give us Desktop users some love in the next design cycle.