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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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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
lowercase28

2 biggest issues (desktop):

- Artist underneath of song title is not user friendly (hard to identify, usually is cut off in friend activity feed). I feel like this almost discredits the artist

- Blue dots on friend activity feed are misleading (look like notification updates and serve no purpose bc of the 3 bars showing user is actively listening)

 

1 issue on mobile:

- when going to "Your Library" tab, there should be an option to lock the view you have. I ALWAYS have to hit the filter at the top to show only playlists when I go to my library, which seems like such an unnecessary extra step when it showed playlists right away before the update

 

lowercase28

Edit to last comment:

Additional desktop feedback - really miss going to an artist's page and seeing the list of all albums with songs going down the page. Having to go into each album from the discography is a bit cumbersome. Maybe have the discography still at the top, but list out all the albums and songs at the bottom underneath the About section

karvaneva

This update is just horrible, everything has been said already in this thread. 

 

Making people click more, dive menus more, deleting features that are useful and used by a majority of users....wth is wrong with you spotify? Listen to your customers!

paulineq

Yikes, this update is terrible. It feels extremely clunky and cumbersome. Some things that I feel need work: 


- On my profile page, I really don't care to see the top artists of the month / top songs of the month. I'm pretty aware of what bands/songs I'm playing frequently. It's also situated at the top of the page... content I don't care for. 

- Also don't care to see thumbnails of my followers/who I'm following. Much preferred when I can just click "Followers" "Following" to see vs. being displayed on my profile page. If we can customize what we display on our profile page, that'd be helpful. 
- Artist page: If I wanna read the bio of the artist I have to scroll past their whole discography. Ain't nobody got time for that. Much preferred when it was at the top / when you clicked on Artist Bio or whatever it was before. 

- Preferred not seeing a thumbnail of the album art next to the song title. It looked cleaner before. 

- The Friend Activity Panel: you made the song title/artist/album type super small now (on 2 lines instead of 3) so when I see what all my friends are listening to, it looks like a whole lot of small clunky type. Really busy looking. 
- If I'm looking at a playlist and go back to look at the other playlists on a profile it doesn't lock the previous view, taking me back to the top of the playlists. It's an inconvenience to scroll down where I last was viewing someone's playlist collection.

Maybe just go back to the previous iteration. That one seemed to flow much better than the current design. Thanks! 

bojrk

I have mixed feelings about this update. 

Mainly I dislike how now when I make a playlist (for example: I have a list with album I'll like to hear at some point) and when I add a whole album and mark the list to be on "Date added" order, the albums I've added are either from the last song of the album and going down to the first, or the first album (ever) added to the list is first.
I prefer it to be with the latest album I've added to be on top, BUT starting with the first song on the album, not backwards... I don't see this issue in the mobile app version.


Also, the Artists name being written under the song or far right (in Friends Activity) is very unfriendly. Artists names deserve better.

About the mobile app: I find it a little confusing this new method of sorting "Your Library"... Also, It'd be great if I could pin more than just 4 playlists.