Type in your question below and we'll check to see what answers we can find...
Loading article...
Submitting...
If you couldn't find any answers in the previous step then we need to post your question in the community and wait for someone to respond. You'll be notified when that happens.
Simply add some detail to your question and refine the title if needed, choose the relevant category, then post.
Before we can post your question we need you to quickly make an account (or sign in if you already have one).
Don't worry - it's quick and painless! Just click below, and once you're logged in we'll bring you right back here and post your question. We'll remember what you've already typed in so you won't have to do it again.
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current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂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
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
There's a June post about the desktop update here: https://spotify.design/article/designing-a-new-foundation-spotify-for-desktop
It looks like mostly tech marketing speak but gives an insight into how this all occurred. They seem very happy about the outcome of the product. I guess this is to attract developers.
As a developer myself I'm frankly I'm a bit unused to pure tech aspects deciding these changes. It's usually a product management decision and they don't necessarily favor a complete rewrite as it will be very hard to carry over the features that were already there.
I made a comment on page 79 , a month ago, that I would be cancelling my Spotify premium if all the new changes to the horrible desktop app weren't reverted.
Goodbye to this absolute dogsh1t product.
Alex Cameron and Reema Bhagat are horrid designers and should be fired immediately.
Damn that page hyping the new UI was frustrating to read. So many buzzwords and empty phrases. I don't want you to save the world with software development, just make a straightforward and usable desktop app.
"The new Desktop app has rolled out, replacing one of Spotify’s oldest and most loved clients. As a Design Team, it's often difficult (sometimes impossible) to take big risks in order to build a future you believe in. The risk of failure is daunting, but the reward — in our case, happened to be too good to pass up."
I'm guessing the reward was a pat on the back by some record label execs for building a better platform to promo their material.
How about this almost a 100 page thread for a reward? You've made a mess of the app and show no signs of wanting to fix it. I would be happy to be proven wrong though!
https://spotify.design/article/designing-a-new-foundation-spotify-for-desktopSatisfaction
Since we took the opportunity to clean up some patterns and introduce new ones, we wanted to check that these changes weren't too disruptive to existing habits or established mental models. To do this, we tested our iterations and new designs with new and existing users and made adjustments as needed. Since our Web Player is continuously deployed, millions of people helped us validate decisions or make the case to pivot our design direction.
Good job measuring your changes on people not using the desktop application. I only used the the web player in rare cases when I had to. It always felt like a light and buggy version of the desktop version. It's nowadays possible to create high performance and good quality web based applications so you don't get to blame it on the tools. The fact that the designers pat themselves on the back and give each other gold medals for this disaster of a rollout in a new post months later shows they also live in their own bubble free from reality. Why not say we messed up and we are working on fixing it?
I'm trying to get accustomed to the new design myself and I figured I share some of the things I learned. Reading the comments, I hope this will help.
@skvirrle - To get a good list of podcasts episodes I want to listen to, I use this new "Your Episodes" thing they added in the library. I just add the episodes I want to listen to and then listen to those from there. It's not perfect, but helped me avoid the scrolling. Having a filter function would be nice for sure.
@Allminoxy and I guess a lot others - I found out that activating shuffle and then clicking on the play button on the top of an artist profile starts shuffling their whole discography, which I like doing and seems to be the same as what it used to.
@dz_91 - there's a "see discography" on the artist pages that can give you a view of all tracks of all albums. You still need to switch between all albums, all EPs and Singles and all Compilations and doesn't list those three things all at once, but honestly, I actually like this, because I am only interested in Albums and maybe Compilations, so having the option to quickly pick those is kinda nice. Your mileage may of course vary.