User Experience

A bad thing about computer screens? They are limited in size.

You’ll notice this, when you build a UI element with a finite amount of possible values. While a slider might be the first approach, it is only useful if the possible values are limited with a upper (max) and lower (min) bound and also in their total number of values. You cant provide a slider with 2000 values, can you? The typical UI element to use is a (web) number input. You can set a min and max value and you can use some logic to map any user input to a valid input. Sounds great? It is! However, it has an important drawback: the missing slider.

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: