Dear Spotify, stop treating your users like testers.
Google has dozens, if not a couple hundred, products. That means dozens of different release cycles, dozens of updates, and tons of new things for the user to constantly learn. But, in order to combat any confusion and frustration that might be caused by the sporadic releases, Google makes an effort to walk you through the changes whenever you visit the product after an update. For example, whenever there’s a new major feature included in Google Docs, I always get a quick pointer to where the feature is and how to use it. This is a good example of how companies with large customer bases can have continuous updates while still making the adoption of the new feature easy for the user.
Then there is Spotify. I love Spotify. I’ve been using Spotify for the past five years. However, the absolutely WORST part about being a Spotify user has to be the updates. Spotify updates always feel more like beta features rather than a completed, polished update. And they appear randomly and out of nowhere. It’s incredibly frustrating to get used to a new feature, begin to like it, begin to rely on it, only for it to be magically removed due to some reason made within the company.
Let’s take Spotify’s recent update which removed the fast scrolling or instant scroll feature. For someone who is constantly adding new music to my library, this feature was an essential. I could easily jump through my almost 5000 song collection without having to scroll through every single song just to get to a certain section of my liked songs playlist. But now, I’m stuck scrolling for what seems like ages (relative to before) and frustrated by the update that Spotify has made. And looks like it isn’t just me who is experiencing this frustration! This feature is apparently something that keeps getting added and removed.
People are frustrated and upset, and it keeps happening over, and over, and over again. So I wonder, why is this something Spotify keeps doing?
There’s another good case of Spotify flip flopping it’s design for no apparent reason or without any given notice: the search filter. The search feature in Spotify has to address a few challenges. The obvious one is it has to figure out what you are searching for. In that regard, Spotify search is relatively straightforward in that it just does a string match of your search term against all the song names, artists, albums (and possibly more fields) in your playlist. But the tricker part to figure out is what happens when you click on one of those songs.
When you click on a song in the list of search results, Spotify has two approaches it can take. One approach is to loop through the songs in your list of songs that appear when you do a search. For example, if I search for Day6 (a great band, would recommend checking them out) I can see that I get a list of songs by Day6. In this list of songs that matches my search, we see that Beautiful Feeling and Live Your Life are next to each other.
So, when I click on Beautiful Feeling , when that song finishes, Spotify will play Live Your Life.
But another approach Spotify can take is to treat the search list as just something that gets displayed, and retain the order of play to be consistent with when there is no search query. The wording is a bit complicated so let me show another example.
When I remove the search query, and just look at the order of my songs by date (which is my default display order for Spotify), we can see that the next song after Beautiful Feeling is MASITNONSOUL by Hyukoh (also a great artist/band, check them out too).
So, what Spotify, as a product, has to decide is when a user does a search and clicks on a song in the search results, should the order of play be what is shown in the search results, or should it be the original, un-filtered playlist from which the songs are being searched from.
It is a decision Spotify has to make. But honestly, whatever decision it is, users will get used to it and learn how to use Spotify in accordance with that they get. But here’s the thing: I’ve noticed that Spotify can’t seem to decide which approach to take. They keep flip-flopping between the first and second option and it’s driving me CRAZY.
This flip-flopping has to stop. Make a decision, and stick to it Spotify. Don’t treat your users like testers. Of course, if you see a better reason to change course of a decision you’ve made, then by all means, make that change! But only if it actually benefits the user. And if you ever find yourself going back and forth between adding a feature, removing that feature, adding a feature… stop and think, hey… maybe if we can keep changing it back and forth there is no “right” or “better” design decision here. There is just needs to be ‘A’ decision that has to be stuck to.
Don’t treat your users like testers.
Besides flip-flopping on their design, Spotify also almost never highlights their new changes when they are implemented. For example, they recently split the shuffle and play buttons (a change I very much dislike, but fine, it’s only the first time I’ve personally seen this split so, let’s hope they don’t revert the change in the next update) without any notice to the user as to why. In fact, I read about this upcoming change, and still had an unexpected experience when I pressed the shuffle button. Let me explain why.
Spotify’s last play button looked like this
And that got changed to this
And now, it looks like this
As you can see in this change, the shuffle button and the play button have been separated. However, there’s a few things here that I had an issue with. For one, up until now, this play button was also a shuffle button. Thus, the idea of pressing a button and having your music begin to shuffle play was something the user had learned to do over a long period of time. Now, however, pressing the shuffle symbol did not result in any music playing. Instead, it is actually the toggle for if the user wants to play the songs shuffled, or not. Then, if you want to actually start the music, you have to press the play button. While this was a small change that I eventually got used to, it’s still frustrating to have to constantly adapt to a product and learn new features that seem more like random changes than thoughtful additions.
Additionally, these new features never get highlighted when they are implemented. Unlike Google Docs, which I talked about earlier, which always “shows you around” the new changes whenever you next open a new google doc, Spotify does not make a huge effort to point out to the user any new changes they have made and what their functionality is. Now, maybe it’s because they assume the changes are straightforward and simple enough that the user will be able to play around a bit and get the hang of it. But having your user just “get the hang of your changes” only creates a frustrating experience for your users. If you want to make a change, go for it! But at least highlight that change to us so we don’t have to figure out how your app works on every change.
I know I’m basically talking about a few small changes that most users may not end up thinking too much about. But I’m confident that while users may not explicitly notice or understand why they suddenly have a harder time using the app, their frustration is real and will add up over time. Products shouldn’t just not change because their users are used to something. Changing how a user interacts with something is, in fact, how many of the most amazing products get made and get adopted! But those changes are always building to something better than before. Spotify is great product and I know there are tons of amazing engineers and designers and product people who put endless thought behind the finished product that we see. But, even so, after experiencing so many of these random, inconsistent changes over the years, it’s tough not to feel frustrated with the product sometimes.
But now I’d like to know your thoughts. If you’re a Spotify user, have you felt these frustrations in the past? Are there any other issues you’ve experienced? Let me know!
If you’re not a Spotify user, how come? And what do you like the most about the music service you use?
Thanks for reading!
