[Android] Remove the Shuffle / Play Button

[-quazar]

Hi, I tried out your new design, which I have mixed feelings about, but nevermind that. The most annoying thing I come over in the new Spotify (for iPhone by the way) is the dumb, big, overlapping, unnecessary shuffle play button that pops up everywhere. Is this a bug or is this on purpose? Could at least had add an option for it. Also, it doesn't look streamlined at all with the current design. Did it even occur that not everyone wants a shuffle play button?

[teammascot]

I'm glad so many people find the default shuffle thing nonsensicle. Please stop the default shuffle on album play and from a design perspective, yes, that giant shuffle button is absurd for premium users.

Having the little icon on the play window as an OPTION is fine.

Good people at Spotify, you must know that artists (most at least) actually plan the order of the songs for their albums ... especially bands that create concept albums that are meant to tell a complete story from song one till the end.  It only makes sense that playing them in order is the default setting. Please fix this.

Thank you.

[mote]

Hallo Spotify!!

Do you not understand the absudity in having a music playing application with no 'PLAY' button?

[bodytaing]

Hey Spotify,

There are many possible, easy fixes for this issue:

• Make the button smaller, and move sorting/filtering UI's in the space gained
• Make the button not overlay playlist content
• Make the button a grayscale or dark button
• Make Shuffle Play a user configurable option

There are many, many other poor user experience issues in the Spotify UI of which I will not touch on in this thread.

Look Spotify, we get it. You've probably ran some A/B tests internally showing what great success in engagement your Shuffle Play button had, but did you stop to think that maybe making "Shuffle Play" take up 20% of your screen real estate, sticky and persistent, is not a valid A/B test?

8 years ago Spotify attracted me with it's offering, it was the best solution. But seeing as how Spotify is choosing to ignore the issue is sad because we were all rooting for Spotify, the underdog to succeed. And now we just get slapped in the face.

After years of dealing with Spotify's poor user experience, I now have a viable solution: I'm switching to Apple Music. I have been a long and loyal customer of Spotify but enough is enough.

Never forget that user experience is the secret to user retention.

[Alias-thejester]

I am about 3 hours into my Spotify premium trial. I already decided that Spotify free is not for me because I don't like to listen to everything in shuffle mode; I like to listen to albums and my playlists in the order they were created. Now I find there is a humongous "shuffle" button where every music app has its "play" button. I get annoyed because there is no obvious way to just press play and I need to consult the internet in order to find out how to just play an album from 1 to finish in ascending order of track number. And I find this thread where people have been asking for two and a half years to get a simple "play" button back.

Would anyone from Spotify like to make a bet on whether I will stay on as a paying client, or whether you will never see me again after the trial expires? And whether I will recommend Spotify to anyone, or whether I will tell them to stay away and keep buying vinyl and CDs and iTunes albums?

This is using the iPad app to play on a Raumfeld system via their beult-in Spotify connect - which otherwise works as a charm and way better than Deezer via the Raumfeld's new chromecast, btw.

PS: Over at the following post, it counts as an idea to be considered, I.e. better than "Not right now". Maybe there is hope? https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Remove-Reduce-Shuffle-Button-on-Mobile-for-Premium-Users...

[bodytaing]

This "New" "Good Idea" has been around for over 2 years marked as "Ignored" by Spotify staff.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Remove-the-darn-shuffle-play-button/idc-p/1535397#M10060...

[Prosserc]

I can't actually work out how to play an album without shuffling on the android app (even as a premium user). This is a real pain.

[Prosserc]

This is the same in the Android app. Please do something about this, it's super annoying to not be able to just pay an album in order.

[idagsol]

This is it! Years of paying for Premium and years of Spotify ignoring that we want to play albums from first track to last track as was supposed from the artist.  I am ashamed to be Swedish and will move to Norway with my family and seek asylum up north where there's no Internet and Spotify shuffle button can't find us. 

[bodytaing]

Several years ago Spotify did two things that really angered me:

1. Removed the "Favorite" feature

2. Added "Shuffle Play" with no way to opt out

Looking back at it now, the move is very calculated. I totally understand why they did it but I still don't agree with it. By doing these 2 things, Spotify is forcibly encouraging users to not listen to albums because they only have licenses to access to a certain amount of music. So how do you retain a user base with no music? Simple: you create your own ecosystem of playlist encouragement and user curation, and staff curation.

It's so intrusive I stopped using Spotify and switched to Apple Music. I moved over all of my Spotify music to Apple Music and so far it's been great. The price is the same (I was a Spotify Premium subscriber for many years). We really just want to listen to our music, our way -- Not Spotify's music Spotify's way.

Spotify will continue to lose subscribers to Apple Music if they don't fix the user experience. In fact it'll cost more NOT to fix it. The amount of subscribers lost to poor UX is likely much greater than the price of 1 year's engineer salary to fix this.

[bugsy_pal]

Please remove the Shuffle play button - it's too big and easily touched by mistake on a phone.