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Ask HN: Why is the Spotify UX so horrible?

45 pointsby omosubiover 3 years ago
A few questions for anyone at Spotify:<p>- Why isn&#x27;t there a list of new episodes from podcasts you follow? (This should be MVP- absolutely every other podcast service i know of has this!) - How exactly am I supposed to use the &quot;your episodes&quot; playlist? - Why don&#x27;t podcasts always sort correctly when you go to a podcast list? - Why can&#x27;t I search within an artist&#x27;s page? even if it&#x27;s limited to their discography? - Why can&#x27;t there be a separate list item in the sidebar for podcasts, artists and albums? - Why can&#x27;t I get to the &quot;find podcasts&quot; area from the library (or the your episodes area)? this used to exist! - in the podcasts section in your library, why can&#x27;t I sort by most recently updated?<p>I get why Spotify is pushing podcasts so hard, but why not implement some absolutely basic features?<p>Phone issues: - Why does it take so long (if it even shows up) for downloaded podcasts to show up when you&#x27;re offline? - what&#x27;s the point of downloading them if they won&#x27;t show up?!?!?!?!?!

18 comments

twofornoneover 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve been using spotify exclusively for a while but I realized at some point that though spotify had helped me discover a mountain of artists, it&#x27;s really difficult for me to remember them, and especially difficult for me to find something to listen to, because unlike the old napster&#x2F;morpheus&#x2F;kazaa days, I can&#x27;t organize my music into a nested structure by genre&#x2F;subgenre&#x2F;artist. And in fact if you&#x27;re not listening to the default common genres that spotify provides, you can&#x27;t realistically search by genre unless you personally make a playlist.<p>I get the feeling this is all about pushing content in your face, Spotify doesn&#x27;t really care as much about allowing the user a convenient way to navigate personal favorites; I think they only recently even added an alphabetical sort for the library page...but when I&#x27;m idly trying to find something to listen to, having to scroll through all of my interests in one giant list is always a chore.
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Cravenover 3 years ago
When I was younger I expected Spotify would eventually &quot;fix&quot; their god awful search for local&#x2F;downloaded content. I&#x27;ve long given up hope though. The only answer is they don&#x27;t care about you when you don&#x27;t actively have bandwidth to download ads. The desktop client semi-recently removed the global search bar - just another example of prioritizing aesthetics over usability.
King-Aaronover 3 years ago
I&#x27;m still pissed off that they&#x27;re pushing adverts into content even though I&#x27;m paying for premium
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thatgerhardover 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve unsubscribed from all podcasts on Spotify almost 6 months ago now, and switched back to apple podcasts for some of the reasons above. I only use spotify for music. On the &quot;Home&quot; page of the app about 50% of my recommended content is still podcasts. I&#x27;m now considering going back to apple music too..
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dankwizardover 3 years ago
I&#x27;d recommend trialling Deezer out. In Australia, it is slightly cheaper than Spotify, pushes higher quality songs, boasts a library of around ~75,000,000 songs, separation of songs&#x2F;podcasts.<p>e: Nearly forgot - Easy to upload custom songs&#x2F;albums. They aren&#x27;t organised the best (On phone, they are all stored in 1 playlist called My MP3s) but they&#x27;re there!
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binarynateover 3 years ago
Why not just switch to a better podcatcher? There&#x27;s a lot of good ones to choose from, like Pocketcasts and Overcast.
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iabover 3 years ago
The Spotify interface is absolutely horrid. And the Apple Watch integration makes me want to cancel my subscription every time I use it.
sergiomatteiover 3 years ago
As a contrasting note, I’ve used Spotify for many years and consider their UI perfectly adequate, if not pleasant.
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hdraover 3 years ago
On podcast - I think the lack of basic features is itself a feature, not a bug.<p>Its a media play, they dont want to be a media player. They want to have a hand on deciding what you listen to.
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dzhiurgisover 3 years ago
Life pro tip for Overcast users - create new playlist &quot;Feed&quot;, select podcasts you subscribe to and select sort Newest to Oldest. How is this not a default view is a mystery to me.<p>p.s. I guess this Spotify haven&#x27;t used Apple Music jokes...
jasonladuke0311over 3 years ago
I just switched to Spotify from Apple Music. UI definitely leaves something to be desired, but it’s better than the Apple Music bug that was chewing through 3-400 Mb&#x2F;hour of cellular data. So it goes.
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crate_barreover 3 years ago
Not sure honestly. Their native iOS app feels like a cheap React Native app or something. I don’t know, maybe they don’t have enough money to hire better?<p>Can’t even minimize the Rogan podcast video (which might actually allow me to browse their other podcasts). They are not marking each topic based on timestamps on Rogan’s show (pretty much a table of contents), where this was always done by community on YouTube.<p>They don’t have comments. I don’t know, I don’t think they care about user experience as much they care about content. Need to care about both.
monkeybuttonover 3 years ago
Why, how, is it even possible to play music that isn&#x27;t downloaded when not on WiFi and the option to download over mobile data is deselected?!
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z5hover 3 years ago
I have a Spotify family account, a wife and two young kids and several Google Home devices. I can’t give my kids legit spotify accounts to play music on the devices, so my account has to be used on multiple devices and my kids can book me off.<p>Not a hard problem to solve but Spotify has known and not cared for years.
cbdumasover 3 years ago
FWIW the Google Podcasts app on Android is great. I never use Spotify to listen to podcasts anymore.
reactspaover 3 years ago
What they&#x27;ve done with the Joe Rogan podcast is unforgivable.<p>I went in looking for clips. Couldn&#x27;t find anything usable. Am still watching clips on YouTube.
NoPicklezover 3 years ago
To address your first point, if you hit Your Library &gt; Podcasts &amp; Shows &gt; There is a playlist called New Episodes.
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Jugurthaover 3 years ago
Here&#x27;s what sucks for me:<p>Ignoring both locale <i>and</i> Country in settings and displaying a language based on my IP address.<p>Half the screen (above the fold) when signed in is &quot;Go Premium. Be happy.&quot;, and I had to search &quot;Open the web player&quot; down there, but I understand.<p>&quot;Open the Web player&quot;, but the route is &quot;&#x2F;browse&quot;, but I understand.<p>The controls of the player are horrible on the &quot;web player&quot;. I have to point and click. How to make it full-screen? &quot;F&quot;? Nope. But there is a key for full-screen, right? Nope. Forward is right-key? Nope. The keyboard shortcuts here do not work: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.spotify.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;article&#x2F;keyboard-shortcuts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.spotify.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;article&#x2F;keyboard-shortcuts</a><p>There are two columns, one for Mac and one for Windows. How about a column for just a keyboard and letting me worry about the OS. I have Ubuntu. On Windows, &quot;Alt-right&quot; supposedly corresponds to &quot;Alt-Right&quot;. If I hit &quot;Alt-Right&quot; on Ubuntu, it goes to the first episode of the podcast.<p>I have one. If I try Cmd-Alt-Right to make it go forward, it goes to the <i>first</i> episode of the podcast. If I hit it again, it goes to the second. If I hit &quot;Alt-Left&quot;, it goes back one episode. This is the behavior of &quot;Next track&quot; and &quot;Previous track&quot; but it&#x27;s improper. When I am on the last episode and hit &quot;Alt-left&quot;, it doesn&#x27;t go to the penultimate episode, it goes to the episode&#x27;s start. Same when on the first episode: if I hit Alt-left, it doesn&#x27;t go to the last episode. There&#x27;s no consistency.<p>There&#x27;s no indication of time when you hover the mouse cursor on the slider. Say you&#x27;re at a timestamp and want to go to another timestamp: a normal way to do it would be to hover over the slider and have the timestamp corresponding to your cursor&#x27;s position appear, and then you slide to the right or the left, click right on the desired &quot;timestamp&quot;.<p>Can&#x27;t do that. No timestamp shown. To go to a timestamp, the best attempt is to click on the dot on the time slider, hold down, and then move it to the desired timestamp... But you can&#x27;t even do that properly, as the resolution is about 17 seconds per slighest move&#x2F;pixel or something. Meaning you cannot hit a <i>specific</i> timestamp.<p>The <i>dot</i> on the time slider is fat as hell. If you&#x27;re at 2:25 and hit pause. Clicking on the right part of the dot (i.e: the intersection between the slider and the circle at angle 0 rad) will bring you to 4:26, more than <i>2 minutes</i> on multi-hour long podcast episode. I don&#x27;t know how it scales down for a song track.<p>In other words, the radius of the <i>dot</i> on the time slider corresponds to 4 minutes.<p>I struggled for several minutes to make the player appear once. I don&#x27;t know how it is reduced&#x2F;docked and clicking on one episode but it didn&#x27;t appear on the screen. Worse, another episode was displayed or something.<p>I just dread using the product&#x2F;interface. I just put the thing on and then don&#x27;t interact with it because I can&#x27;t control it (except Space for pause&#x2F;play). If I interact with it I know I will only hate it and I don&#x27;t want to.