Spotify - Three clicks instead of one - The Problem Child #2

In my previous post I wrote about Spotify’s bad refresh process on its app’s home tab. In this post it’s about one of Spotify’s most important views, the media player, and the button to add and remove songs¹ from the user’s library.

Users Complaining and Spotify’s Challenge

Users are always complaining about Spotify’s UI changes . I understand both sides:

• it is difficult to have to adapt to a new UI regularly
• it is complicated to build an intuitive and feature rich media player for such a large and diverse user base However, Spotify can do better and did better in the past. The problem explained below is nothing new. It was well designed and implemented in the past.

The Media Player

A few decades ago, a media player consisted of play, pause, next (song), previous (song), metadata (title, artist, cover artwork) and sometimes buttons for shuffle and repeat. The music library was maintained from a desktop computer and only available in offline use which means that there was no need and no possibility to create and manage playlists on the device. Spotify (and all other streaming services) nowadays support playlist creation and a default playlist². With these and all the other features it’s a challenge to set everything up so that everyone is satisfied. Especially Spotify itself.

The playlist feature

To make a streaming app more than just a media player, concepts like the playlist feature were introduced. The basic functionality of the feature is:

• create, add (songs), delete your playlists
• change the playlist cover and name
• make it a public playlist (this is one of just a few ways to increase the interactions between Spotify users and thus increasing the app usage time)
• make it a private playlist to listen to it only when you’re on your own
• “Follow” or “Save” existing playlists by other users or artists to your own list of playlists

In particular, public playlists created by users who are not associated with Spotify help to increase interactions without spending a lot of money. Some of these public playlists have thousand of followers and saves. However, humans are lazy. Why break your habits and create playlists when you can already do almost anything with your default playlist? So the question is, how can the Spotify’s development team increase usage of the playlist feature? There’s a simple solution to this:

urge the user to use it.

The Problem

The problem is that the implementation of the app behavior differs from the way the user expects the app to react. This is due to the strategy to promoting/pushing the playlist feature. A user interview about this feature could look like this:

This is how the add/remove process on the media player view currently looks like:

A table and a picture are worth a thousand words. A single click to add a song to your library but three clicks to remove a song from it. This is simply two clicks too many. And this is how it should be implemented instead:

What would I do differently?

• A single click to remove the song from your library³
• Add a Change button to the Removed from Liked Songs. popup
• Additionally, one could think about integrating a longpress or a Force Touch on the ⨁/✅ icon to trigger the playlist picker modal

I understand that Spotify wants user’s to use their features. However, it is never a good idea to replace expected behavior on important buttons to promote them.