New Desktop Experience - your feedback wanted!

[Hubo]

Spotify is testing a new way for you to connect with your music on Desktop. The new desktop experience features an all-new design, streamlined with the Spotify apps on all your devices. 

This is a brand-new experience and some parts are still being fine-tuned. Be sure to give feedback with the steps below to let the right folks know what you think could be improved.

The other Rock Stars and I got the chance to test the new desktop experience first and now more users will be able to test it out and give their feedback for the team. If you are a passionate Spotify user and would like to join the Rock Star Program and be part of cool experiences like this, then check out this help article.

How do I know if I’m using the New Desktop Experience?

The new desktop experience is not hard to spot with its new design! Your Library looks like this for example:

 

Why did the app change? 

This test is rolled out to a specific group of users at this moment. It’s not possible to sign up for this right now, but your interest is really appreciated. If you’re interested in testing out new versions of Spotify before everyone else, check this out: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Answers/How-do-I-become-a-Spotify-Beta-tester/ta-p/4551518. 

If you’re looking for more information about how tests work and about how features are released, take a look here: https://support.spotify.com/article/why-am-i-seeing-different-features-than-my-friends/.

How to give feedback?

This thread is your go-to destination for asking questions, getting help for issues you may have, as well as to share your impressions and feedback on this new desktop experience. 

Keep in mind that pictures can say a thousand words, so if you have any screenshots of something you’d like to share of your experience be sure to post them here as well! The right teams at Spotify take their time to read the posts in this thread and use your feedback to fine-tune this new experience for everyone.

[Hubo]

Hi Everyone,

Dan here from the Desktop team again.  Desktop 1.1.55 is starting to roll out now and I wanted to let you know what to expect.

Fullscreen mode
We’ve brought back a new and improved fullscreen mode for Desktop, making better use hi-res artist imagery where available.

Playlisting

• The “create similar” playlist context menu item has been added to the main playlist list in the app
• We’ve improved playlist loading performance when navigating throughout the client
• Show the downloaded badge in the liked songs button when it’s available offline
• Improvements to the use-case of filtering to find a track within a long playlist
  

General

• Episode sorting on podcast show pages, back with improved performance
• Podcast play order improvements, better selecting which episode to play when playing from cards/search etc
• Added the ability to see subtitles on videos where they are available.
• Improved refreshing of content on Home to ensure fresh content
• Show the top 5 cities where people listen to an artist on the artist about page
• Where there are multiple versions of a release, show a dropdown on the album page allowing the user to switch between them

As always, please do ensure you’re fully updated and are running the latest version. We again thank you for the feedback provided. 

Thanks,
Dan

[EthanS1]

It’s time for a new look, in this update, Desktop has had a little makeover. You’ll discover a brand new titled look on your browse section similar to what you see on Mobile & Web Player today, you’ll see all of the genres ready to discover and easily accessible for you to discover more. Adding to a playlist is easier than ever when you are looking to add to a playlist no more scrolling through a list of playlists looking for the right one, you can now click the corresponding tile and you’re on the move - I’ve found this super helpful!

The new Desktop experience is pretty cool with lots of changes which are here and will get you to your music, right here, right now which is what Spotify’s all about. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts! What’s new that you’ve discovered?

We’re staying tuned!

[Jose_M]

Awesome update and awesome post! Well done @EthanS1 @Hubo @Emilia_8 @dinomight 🙂 🎉

[dinomight]

I really like the direction Spotify is moving with this new version of the desktop software. It’s nice when things are refreshed once in a while, and I feel like this is becoming much more streamlined and generally feels faster than the previous version. I think it’s really good for consistency having this and the web player be more closely related.

The new format of playlists is great. It’s nice to be able to see the album artwork next to tracks just like in the mobile apps, and I’m glad to see that sorting and filter features are functional as those have always been very important to me, especially when working with larger playlists. Overall, I like that the tracks have a bit more breathing room now, and this should be useful on devices with touch screens as well.

Overall, great work so far!

[celta1707]

The option to remove from this playlist does not work when you do it in the current playback. I put an image, it would be the third option below.

[Minup]

Hey!

I just got access to the beta today and i personally really dislike it. The search bar is no longer available everywhere, rather you have to go onto the search tab to get access to it. You can also no longer press previous when you are in a 1 song playlist, so you cant rewind without manually draggin the bar anymore.

Other than that it look pretty good, but the color of playlists that can't be edited could be a little bit brighter

[intellix]

STRONGLY hate the new UI. Just the other day I was trying another service due to Sony 360 support for my new headphones and figured I hated it due to everything being in album pages and today Spotify updates to look exactly the same.

The way I've been using Spotify is going to an Artist and scrolling through the albums and playing odd songs from odd albums. I don't know songs by album. I just want to scroll down until I see the box art and the name and click play.

Now I need to know the album that a particular song is in, click into it, play it.... exit, go into another album.

You can't even buy albums anymore so why do we need to go into album specific pages to listen to individual songs? 

Example: You want to listen to various Queen songs:

 - Bohemian Rhapsody

 - Don't stop me now

 - I want to break free

 - Miracle

Now... what album do I have to click into to find each of those songs? I have no idea because I never bought albums before. They might be in the Popular songs, but my favourite artist is "Infected Mushroom" and there's probably about 50 songs I like from them.

Artists like Queen and Michael Jackson are the worst cause they release new albums all the time with a variety of different songs on each... how am I meant to know which album I need to click into to get to a song I want?

I hate this UI so much I'm seriously going to cancel Spotify if the previous discography view doesn't come back.

P.S. I'm not one of those people who complain about things changing... I've seen my fair share of complainers during each of the Facebook UI refreshes but this is just worse in every way.

[Reflux961]

i really dislike this new UI the layout is so odd removing the search bar was a no no that thing is really useful. oh and not to mention the volume slider is completly **bleep**ed it isnt smooth it has severe lag and the volume near the middle of the bar is like its at the lowest for the old version and then jumps 20 times louder the more u move the slider to the right.

i dislike the fact i have to click "Your Library" to find my playlists and the discover weekly. 

i prefered the old way of searching for music that showed genres since it showed album covers and the cool logos they had.

and the most annoying thing is that big **bleep**ing bar to the right that says friend activity just heads up not everyone will have facebook or like to have that showing on there music player.

oh and dont forget the fact that when u add new music to a playlist it now goes to the top of the music player instead of the bottom for me thats **bleep**ing annoying since i have my playlist set up in a way that segments my music into areas i listnt to if i want to listn to certain music.

all in all this UI i think is not good at all i dislike nearly everypart about it.

[intellix]

Strongly dislike this update. Nobody knows what album a song is inside. It was easier/better before where you could just scroll down through a list of all the songs grouped per album.

Let's say you want to listen to "Queen: I Want It All". How many albums you do you think I have to click through to get to it? You can't even use OSX swipe backwards to go back. 

PLEASE add the ability to switch between a grid of albums and a list of all songs in each album like it was before. It's literally just an icon on the top right of the album grid and I wouldn't be too annoyed about having to click Discography first

[kcwebbah]

I somehow unfortunately got pushed this new desktop update and I really dislike it. My main frustrations are: (1) No longer column for Artist and instead buried under track name, (2) Local files are not sorted in track order, (3) No longer a setting to change cache location, (4) Unnecessary waste of space showing each tracks album art in a playlist (esp when playing a full album). Please give me an option to go back to the older version!

[kcwebbah]

One additional annoyance I just discovered: after a playlist ends and it goes to [Playlist Name] radio, I can no longer see the previous or upcoming tracks by clicking the album art (bot left).  You now have to go to Queue to see upcoming and then History to see previously played..so frustrating!

[Hubo]

After trying the new experience, I thought it looked really good; a much-needed refresh. 😉 Much more streamlined and it fits in perfectly with the app on my iPhone and with the Web Player. I had quite some feedback about the new experience when I first tried it and now much has improved already which I’m really glad about. 

As always, it needs some time getting used to, but I quickly fell in love with how the visual elements are highlighted and how there’s more space for album-art and playlist covers.

Really curious to see what you guys think of this New Desktop Experience! Hope to see your feedback and I hope you’ll have a similar first impression! ✨

[intellix]

It's not that it takes some getting used to though. A whole way of using the application has been removed. The ability to go to an artist and scroll through every single song, ordered by release date and grouped by Album. Now you need to go into individual albums to play songs.

I could sit all day on an individual artists page and scroll up/down playing odd songs as I wanted but now I have to search for them inside album pages. The album pages were always there but I never used them.

Also bare in mind, the UI is now an exact copy/paste of every other service out there. The previous view was a differentiator and it's been thrown away.

I don't say: "I feel like listening to this whole album". I say "I feel like listening to various songs by this artist and I want to pick and choose them throughout the day as I please". I used search when I wanted to search for a specific song.

[ambershee]

I hate it - absolutely hate it, I actually came in here looking for a way to revert to the previous interface. The two biggest problems are the sheer volume of wasted space, and the accessibility of anything is worse than before since most things are hidden between layers of menus when they were previously just plain on the screen.

For example, if I browse to an artist, the huge banner takes up the entire top 1/3rd of the screen. The banner and the 'popular tracks' list doesn't even fit on a single 1080p screen.

Instead of being shown their discography, with a list of all tracks on a single page, there's now a set of four large tiles. I now have to click 'see all' to get the full list where I didn't need to before. This list is also large tiles; some artists have multiple versions of albums with different tracks on them - it's hard and sometimes impossible to distinguish between them because they have the same cover and largely the same title, and if the title is more than about 25 characters the name gets completely cut off (this is utterly hopeless). I then have to click again to open the album.

Spotify is a music player - nesting the actual music three menus deep is a UX disaster. It's totally unnecessary and makes everything far more difficult than it was before for no obvious benefit. Trying to listen to artists who release large numbers of singles or EPs rather than full albums is now practically impossible without creating a playlist to encompass their work.

Playlists and release listings suffer from the same problems, though not as bad. Where before both had a unified interface where you could see a list encompassing some 30+ tracks, with the title, artist, album, length, popularity all one one neat line, there's now less information split over the equivalent of around four lines thanks to all the empty space. It's less informative, harder to read, and spreads critical content over more space than before.

If I'm unable to revert to the old interface, I'll have to unsubscribe - I simply cannot use this interface the way it's set up, it just doesn't work for me at all.

[ImanisEgo]

Really dislike the update, removing the search bar was really dumb. Currently whenever I add a song to a playlist it adds it to the beginning of the playlist instead of the end like usual. On mobile when I add the song it goes to the end so I don't know what the decision was to change it on the desktop application at least try to keep things consistent. Another problem with playlists is using the search feature in the playlist to find a specific song. If I type the song name with a space nothing will pop up at all but when I type the name without a space it'll show just fine. Please give us an option to revert to the previous iteration or fix the problems such as the search bar and other concerns that people have.

[Windyce]

I don't hate it, I miss having all the album songs appear when I go onto an artists page but I can live with that. I preferred having all the songs show up at once so I could relative popularity per song at a glance.

But the color of the downloaded sign needs to go back to being green. You've trained us for ages that grey download sign means it isn't downloaded while green is downloaded. If I've downloaded something it should be in the green colour. I just had to redownload my 1500 downloaded songs

As an aside, the "I'm not a robot' captcha is obnoxious as all **bleep**. My verification keeps expiring, taking control away from typing. But it needs to be done to preview my post.

EDIT: The word I wrote that was bleeped was the christian hades. I hardly think that needed to be censored, as it now looks like I've done an actual swear rather than a blasphemy

[Windyce]

New problem - it used to save my sorting preference for my playlists. I have one which I just by date added so I can easily listen to my new favorite sons when I don't want to shuffle. Saves lots of scrolling.

Now after you leave the page and go back it is on the default sorting. I really don't want to have to keep enabling it. Particularly bad is if this behavior goes to the iOS which lacks a scrollbar entirely.

[RicoDG]

First of all, the new look looks nice.

Only in my first time experience I came across three simple problems right at the start.

I like the friends tab so I can see what they're listening to. The problem I'm facing here is that if I'm in my playlist and I want to use the scroll function on the right side of the screen, my cursor almost always goes a little to far and opens the friends tab.

The 2nd problem I have is this. In the previous version when you clicked on another tab, the tab you had open previously stayed on the songs you were looking at when you went back to the tab. Now if you go back to your previous tab it automatically brings you back to the top of the playlist.

The 3rd problem I have is this. In the previous version you could always search a new song in every tab. Unfortunately you can't do that anymore.

These were the first 3 problems I was facing... Hoping I don't face any more...

[RicoDG]

Also one more thing. Why is the tab with the liked songs of an artist gone?

[treeninja1999]

Not a fan of the new update. The connect to Facebook is obnoxious, please for the love of god remove it. The fact that when I hover over the area it covers up the scroll bar is beyond annoying for me. As others have stated, the volume slider is not nearly as smooth, and removing the search bar is stupid. I get that you want to update the platform, but don't do it for the sake of doing it! We're losing features, not getting any more!