Spotify wins users for its UI, no doubt. With the dark background like Netflix that no music apps has ever used, it makes the artwork contents more outstanding and inspirational for music lovers, plus its excellent recommendation feature.

“Spotify has great UX” — no, nobody nods their heads. However I don’t think I’m here to blame or anything, we’re all trying to make it better day by day. So in this article I’ll state some problems with Spotify UX that may make sense.

Reachability

60% of music streamers now listening on mobile — due to Spotify’s research. So optimizing the app on mobile is no strange thing. However what I’m experiencing everyday from Spotify leaves me no good feelings about the reachability of the elements.

What most listeners do while listening to a song is whether to save it to their library or not. But putting the Save button on the left edge of the screen seems to make no sense for us. Moving to the full lyrics screen, do you notice the Close button at the top left corner? How are you gonna close the screen with one hand …

These images will explain why I said those words above:

Believe me now? With the size of iPhone XS Max in the future, nobody’s gonna be able to save songs or close the lyrics …

With the suggestion of one reader of my article before, the most-pressed-buttons or regions like Search or Play should be put to the reachable zone too, like what Lyft did to their app.

What I learn from this: Mobile first, and put the most used elements down to the reachable zone as the size of the screen is bigger and bigger for one hand users.

Hidden features

There are many needed features that are hidden by some mystery in Spotify that makes me dizzy some times, shown in the pictures below

“There’s no way to search in your playlist” — That’s what I thought, until I unintentionally slided down the screen and saw it right-there, with a mysterious hamburger button. And finally i knew the hamburger button is to sort your list.

Then I saw the 3dots at the top right, I pressed, and saw the edit thing. It moved me to the third screens, with even more mysterious hamburgers.(wondering which fastfood stall I was at) But putting your finger on the hamburger to move the song was impossible, you have to press 1second to make it move. What a strange thing to do ..

What I learn from here: Define which features are important to the users’ flow of use, and make it clear. The era of hamburgers is dead.

Other features

There may be two things I wanna discuss here: the put-songs-to-a-playlist thing and the devices-to-play-songs thing.

Add songs to playlists

First of all, you cannot choose a lot of songs to put in a playlist, or I haven’t figured it out yet …

What I supposed after I created a playlist was, you chose a lot of songs in your library, then choose “Add to playlist” and done. But no, there is no such option. You have to press on the 3dots thing right next to a song, and add every-single-song to the playlist. What a waste of time for a playlist made of 90 songs like mine.

Listen on devices