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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

2,290 Comments
alerio

Was the suggested songs feature removed for playlists? I remember that when you would scroll to the bottom of your playlist you can find songs that are similar to what you already looking for it. I've been trying to expand one of my current playlists and it's rather annoying that I can't find the feature anywhere. There is a "Find more" option, but that only asks me to look for songs or artists. I've attached a screenshot below of what I am referencing..


Before the update:

alerio_1-1618639901104.jpeg

After the update:

 

alerio_0-1618639789652.png

 

GTImk7

Hi!
As a very regular Spotify user (listening to music every day via the Spotify desktop application on Windows PC), I want to share my opinion on the new desktop app. I personally like when UI's freshen up from time to time, but it has to be in a way, that an existing user doesn't have to relearn the whole app. (Not only my personal opinion, I think this is one of a few rules to a good UI design) Sadly, this is the case with this update, and not every change has made the app better. In detail:

 

- Search bar: needs to come back to its old place. It is just nice to be able to search for a song at any time, without having to change the active tab first. This doesn't mean the search tab has to go, for extended searching it might be helpful. But for a quick search, I prefer the all-time-visible search bar at the top.

 

- Searching songs inside a playlist: It wouldn't be a huge change to make the necessary search field visible all the time, without the user having to click the icon first to make it appear.

 

- Songnames and artists: They belong next to each other, in different columns. ATM, its tideous to sort a playlist by artists - and I personally thought it wasn't possible any more at all. Plus playlists are not as lucid as they were before the update.

 

- Album covers inline: Didn't like it at first, but now I get it. I'd be fine with it, when song names and artists are separated again.

 

- There seems to be a bug with the order of songs played: In one of my playlists, Spotify keeps playing the songs in the order 1-3-2-4-5-6-7-8... (swapping 3rd and 2nd song). With an empty song queue as well as another playlist played before, doesn't matter. Always plays them in the wrong order.

jimverneuil

Not having the exact date of release of a track on the desktop interface makes me go check on Apple Music when it was out ! At some point it's going to be easier switching to Apple Music...

professorludic

I actually feel defeated and sad by this update. It makes me feel stupid. I don't know how to interact with it in the ways I've been interacting with it for years (the list of artist's tracks/full discography, for example), but I also I don't have the time or the energy to figure it out, especially with all that is going on in the world right now.  I have zero mental space to spend on "relearning" a tool just so I'm less frustrated with my interactions with it. 

 

I'm tired of redesigns that seem more for marketing purposes than for user experience. I'm also tired of corporate responses that seem little more than "but it's for your own good!" or "keep up or get left behind!". I guess I'll have to get left behind this time. 

 

Updates and changes have benefit and are needed (I don't argue with that), but why can't those be more gradual or less obvious if they really are for bettering user experience? 


I'm fully aware that one disappointed customer's experience doesn't matter an ounce to Spotify, but I felt the need to express myself. I've felt frustrated with updates before (that's to be expected a little), but this is the first time I actually feel sad.

surfyournut

Dear Dan and Spotify Team,

 

Thanks for this opportunity to provide feedback. I have to say it took a bit of digging to find the thread. I'll say a few things about the service in general and some specific feedback about the new UI, and allow me to add that I've been a loyal paying customer for a long time.

 

Library Management:

Having always used Playlists to group, save and enjoy music by artists I like, I was glad when the Save feature arrived back in 2014 or so - but I quickly hit the cap of saved songs ("Epic collection, friend..."). What I've always wanted was an easy way listen to the discography of an artist all in one place, but to keep those in a list without relying on memory. Until recently, playlists were the only feasible way to do this, and as such I have thousands. But they're a pain to manage. You either need to use the navigation bar on the left (with no sorting/filtering) to find the playlist you want to add to, then drag and drop albums or songs with the mouse. Or you select and use the right-click contextual menu to add them to the playlist from that same long list. You want to move a playlist from the bottom of the list to the top? Have fun waiting for 10mins as it scrolls when you drag-and-drop! The hidden feature to be able to filter the right-click add-to-playlist list by typing the name of the playlist you want was very useful - but this has gone in the latest update!

 

Now to find and edit your playlist you'll need to scroll the long list in the navigation bar, or in the playlist view in a cluttered, un-customisable interface swimming in oversized artwork. Custom sorting is nice, but this again is managed via the navigation bar on the left, not in the main window - like you'd imagine. Like many others I'd appreciate a slimmed down list-view, and the ability to sort and filter my playlists whilst simultaneously browsing music to add.

 

I've noticed the new 'Artists' view under Library lists artists you've followed, so this is probably the way for me to go for now - but I'll have to retrospectively follow any artists I've missed in the past decade or so. I appreciate that you can download an entire discography, but will need to resort to playlists to sort and filter down music for download on my phone, so the pain points remain.

 

I would love it if Spotify would provide more flexible options for the collection and curation of our listening choices, and guidance on how we as users can manage this more efficiently. Your 'discover weekly' algorithm is usually excellent, but once I've discovered an artist I want to remember them, curate my listening experience and easily chop and change playlists.

 

Smart Playlists:

Further to the above, I suggest the addition of smart playlists, in a similar way to the way Steam does this for games. Even iTunes did this back when it came out.

 

A user should be able to make a playlist that will automatically curate and grow based on your filtering. These could even just be a 'smart search' saved in the guise of a playlist. I see the potential to support this in your software and hope this idea isn't new, please consider it.

 

Bring back text filtering of 'Add to Playlist' contextual menu:

The ability to right click on music in the PC app, go to 'add to playlist', then type to filter the contextual menu's list of Playlists was amazingly useful. This hidden feature was a way to manage a long list of Playlists and quickly add to them. The latest update has removed this feature, and I find no fast way to add the latest music by an artist to their already existing playlist, given that both browsing new music and browsing your playlists occupy the same window.

 

The 'copy' 'paste' method will suffice for now, but it's slower and more time consuming to go back and forth between views.

 

PC Application Performance:

Lastly I'll mention that the new UI on PC (Win 10) is slow and laggy.

 

I've experienced lag scrolling through the new Playlist interface, which I assume is due to caching the artwork of so many. Like others I like the option to see the artwork, but now that I browse by keywords and artist name I rarely even know the artwork for my favourite albums so, unless I'm interested to see it, this serves no navigational purpose. It clutters the view, in my opinion.

 

I've also noticed a lack of responsiveness when performing fairly normal searches and browsing, even just scrolling through the keyboard shortcuts window. My PC is of a high spec, handling games and video editing software with ease, so something is off here.

 

Visual Quality:

Whilst album artwork looks more or less the same, text, icons and buttons appear to have lowered in fidelity, looking jagged and blocky. It does not look like a polished, premium, paid music service.

 

Overall I appreciate some of the new features, but the new UI looks like an alpha product. There are some good ideas in there, but they're disjointed. The User Experience feels rough and my own browsing and listening experience is not as smooth.

 

Best of luck with development, I hope to look forward to the return of some beloved features and improved library management, as well as better user education of how to get the best out of the service.

 

Surf.