Ask HN: Why is the Spotify UX so horrible?

The Spotify interface is absolutely horrid. And the Apple Watch integration makes me want to cancel my subscription every time I use it.

When I was younger I expected Spotify would eventually "fix" their god awful search for local/downloaded content. I've long given up hope though. The only answer is they don't care about you when you don'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.

I'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's really difficult for me to remember them, and especially difficult for me to find something to listen to, because unlike the old napster/morpheus/kazaa days, I can't organize my music into a nested structure by genre/subgenre/artist. And in fact if you're not listening to the default common genres that spotify provides, you can't realistically search by genre unless you personally make a playlist.

I get the feeling this is all about pushing content in your face, Spotify doesn'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'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.

I'm still pissed off that they're pushing adverts into content even though I'm paying for premium

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/hour of cellular data. So it goes.

I'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/podcasts.

e: Nearly forgot - Easy to upload custom songs/albums. They aren't organised the best (On phone, they are all stored in 1 playlist called My MP3s) but they're there!

On podcast - I think the lack of basic features is itself a feature, not a bug.

Its a media play, they dont want to be a media player. They want to have a hand on deciding what you listen to.

Life pro tip for Overcast users - create new playlist "Feed", select podcasts you subscribe to and select sort Newest to Oldest. How is this not a default view is a mystery to me.

p.s. I guess this Spotify haven't used Apple Music jokes...

To address your first point, if you hit Your Library > Podcasts & Shows > There is a playlist called New Episodes.

Why, how, is it even possible to play music that isn't downloaded when not on WiFi and the option to download over mobile data is deselected?!

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.

Not a hard problem to solve but Spotify has known and not cared for years.

Why not just switch to a better podcatcher? There's a lot of good ones to choose from, like Pocketcasts and Overcast.

As a contrasting note, I’ve used Spotify for many years and consider their UI perfectly adequate, if not pleasant.

What they've done with the Joe Rogan podcast is unforgivable.

I went in looking for clips. Couldn't find anything usable. Am still watching clips on YouTube.

I'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 "Home" page of the app about 50% of my recommended content is still podcasts. I'm now considering going back to apple music too..

Here's what sucks for me:

Ignoring both locale and Country in settings and displaying a language based on my IP address.

Half the screen (above the fold) when signed in is "Go Premium. Be happy.", and I had to search "Open the web player" down there, but I understand.

"Open the Web player", but the route is "/browse", but I understand.

The controls of the player are horrible on the "web player". I have to point and click. How to make it full-screen? "F"? Nope. But there is a key for full-screen, right? Nope. Forward is right-key? Nope. The keyboard shortcuts here do not work: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/keyboard-shortcuts

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, "Alt-right" supposedly corresponds to "Alt-Right". If I hit "Alt-Right" on Ubuntu, it goes to the first episode of the podcast.

I have one. If I try Cmd-Alt-Right to make it go forward, it goes to the first episode of the podcast. If I hit it again, it goes to the second. If I hit "Alt-Left", it goes back one episode. This is the behavior of "Next track" and "Previous track" but it's improper. When I am on the last episode and hit "Alt-left", it doesn't go to the penultimate episode, it goes to the episode's start. Same when on the first episode: if I hit Alt-left, it doesn't go to the last episode. There's no consistency.

There's no indication of time when you hover the mouse cursor on the slider. Say you'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's position appear, and then you slide to the right or the left, click right on the desired "timestamp".

Can'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't even do that properly, as the resolution is about 17 seconds per slighest move/pixel or something. Meaning you cannot hit a specific timestamp.

The dot on the time slider is fat as hell. If you'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 2 minutes on multi-hour long podcast episode. I don't know how it scales down for a song track.

In other words, the radius of the dot on the time slider corresponds to 4 minutes.

I struggled for several minutes to make the player appear once. I don't know how it is reduced/docked and clicking on one episode but it didn't appear on the screen. Worse, another episode was displayed or something.

I just dread using the product/interface. I just put the thing on and then don't interact with it because I can't control it (except Space for pause/play). If I interact with it I know I will only hate it and I don't want to.

FWIW the Google Podcasts app on Android is great. I never use Spotify to listen to podcasts anymore.

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?

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.

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.