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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[cbizz]

This update sucks. 

I like to listen to multiple albums by an artist--to play through them as I used to be able to. Now I can't do that but I get album tiles, which is seriously the coolest design pattern from 2016. Thanks for that. 

From your b.s. article: "so we can continue providing you with the best listening experience possible" -Yeah, cool. How is it better? 

Awesome on updating your codebase and changing your UI for change's sake, but pretty sure that doesn't mean you have to eliminate features and make the UX worse.

[potenzh]

Not a good update to Desktop UI.  Searches only show a list of album covers - which assumes I know which album a song is on.  No longer has an 'About' feature which was great when discovering new artists.  Starts on a page without a 'Search' option - which is just bizarre... Starts on a page with a big irrelevent advert.  Says 'Good afternoon' which would annoy me at any time of day, and it's currently 00:40AM.  The phony graphic equaliser icon when playing is distracting and not in time with the music.

[A_Mystery]

It'd be nice to be able to use the old UI until the new one is more fleshed out (instead of having to install an old version). 

I just really don't like changing the UI for change's sake. The new one, as far as I've seen, does not add much if anything to the user experience. It's less clean and more bulky, with the artist shown below the song name and an album picture next to it (making it take up 3 times the vertical space and making navigating large playlists annoying), or the friends tab that I have never used. On top of that, some functionality (like copy pasting into a specific part of a playlist, drag and dropping playlists to show the name and artist instead of spotify URL) was removed and it is buggy (some text is invisible). I can get used to a new UI, but I cannot change functionality. That's where the frustration lies.

I've already posted my main concerns here earlier, but for people wondering about local files, they can be found in the playlists tab when you go to your library (as was pointed out in another thread).

[zombieman81]

For the machine I use Spotify on most at present, a GPD Pocket 2 sitting alongside my work laptop so I can have music while I work I have (as I felt like doing when previously commented) performed a file restore putting an older desktop client (mid 2020) back.

In that scenario the new UI is totally impractical with the name of the playlist taking up maybe a third of the height of the screen(?) and even scrolling down only a handful of tracks at once. This is an extreme case but the old client worked very well for me.

The growing trend seems to be UI/UX designers creating interfaces that work on their snazzy big monitors but make for bad experience on smaller displays trying to use apps at anything less than full screen. Saw similar with Blizzard's Battle.net recently. It's like the UI design target is for devices where you can only have one application on screen at once - tablet or 8-bit home micro style single tasking is NOT a valid design target for a music player especially.

Before I launch Spotify on any other computers I will try to remember to take a backup, maybe even taking the time to add the "classic" override to the prefs file as a precaution, because IMHO this "xpui" is just not fit for use yet. Triple clicking of a track name column header to sort by artist? That's an ugly totally non-intuitive hack, not a design!

[Medina33]

With everyday that passes I come to the realisation that Corporate Spotify don't care at all about their customers. We as listeners have been very vocal about the awful changes to the Desktop app. And what do we get in response? An stupid FAQ bulletin in which they justify themselves and keep pretending that there isn't anything wrong with their new platform. They need a REALITY CHECK! 

Are you even reading this? If not, why even bother having a community section? Spotify, you went from being the best music platform in the market, to now being absolute trash, but you won't admit it. People at the top of your business thought they could foolish us, spoon feeding us a downgraded version.. But guess what? You haven't actually fooled nobody. The joke is on you! Spotify and Co., you are the biggest loser!