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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 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

[DouweBoer]

Hello, I cannot use my media keys on my keyboard to play, pause, forward and back. This is on multiple Windows devices.

Spotify ver: 1.1.61.583.gad060c66-a

[Other_Self]

Alright everyone, report julian for misleading information. 

[acidjunkie]

WTB: Artist column and Search bar in the UI.....

[theguywithcheez]

So my Spotify client updated yet again, but not surprisingly no issues have been fixed. Now even more problems are happening, the biggest one being with playback of everything; playback randomly stops, switches to mono, then stops again with a message saying that the song can't be played.  Nothing happens until I close Spotify and open it again. This is happening many times a day and makes this crummy beta UI nearly unusable. Another issue; each time a page is loaded, the client loads and re-loads it 3-4 times before displaying something making navigation extremely annoying. This is definitely not my internet connection, its happening at work where I have a 200+Mbps hardwired network connection, and also at home.

The behavior of this app, the lack of updates or even acknowledgement of issues from Spotify dev team, and the general lack of communication from the company in general is totally unacceptable for a paid service. How can anyone on any UX team anywhere go over 2 months without saying anything to quell obviously irritated users? I have been a premium subscriber for several years now and its sad to see Spotify completely ignore valid complaints and suggestions, but instead focus on bogus features literally no one is asking for.

I have been following this thread getting emails of new posts many times a day for the past few months and have read every comment, and not once has ANYONE suggested that those sidebars need to be resizable in this thread. Literally minutes after this blog post was made, someone addressed many issues that are STILL HERE but the devs felt the need to make a togglable sidebar resizable instead of fixing actual service-denying issues.

There are countless valid suggestions here that are being blatantly ignored; move the Artist name back to its own dedicated column to give them the credit they deserve, fix the back button so it actually works, allow already played podcast episodes to be hidden which was a feature but was taken away, moving discography view to how it was, NONE of these issues have been addressed and with each update the UX experience is getting worse and worse.

I am cancelling the renewal for my subscription for next month and will be switching services. It takes a lot to set me off but Spotify has done it, I'm done with this BS. I gave the dev team time to fix their obvious mistakes and deliver a product that actually works, but nope. Nothing has changed.

[theguywithcheez]

I just want to give a quick shoutout to Julian for being a Spotify employee to finally post some sort of update here, but too little too late unfortunately.

A few posts up from here, lblackwelluk makes a very good point and idea; if Spotify is making their users do the beta testing, then the Company needs to be and should be more transparent about what new features are in the pipeline and what bugs are being worked on. Coming out of nowhere with a MASSIVE service change is unacceptable. I didn't get a prompt about the forced beta until after I re-installed the desktop client because I thought it somehow loaded the mobile app version. Being closed-doors in this situation yields no good results as seen too frequently in this thread with users cussing out into the void as to whoever was so bold as to ruin their precious UI, and being generally inhospitable.

Take a page from other software only companies, Valve is a major player Ive used here before as an example for roll-outs of new features. They have an opt-in beta system for many years now that is as easy as one click; why not do the same? This alone would have prevented nearly this entire thread and countless irritated customers that can't use the service they paid for. I'm just so disappointed that such a large player in the music industry that has made many musicians have successful careers will just dump on its userbase like this.

There's still no excuse for 60+ days without some sort of update on whats being done. It could be as simple as posting a short simplified list of what general things the Dev team is currently fixing every week, like 'relocating artist column', 'rebuilding discography view' but radio silence is all we get. This alone has turned many users off from the service including myself.