Spotify will today reveal major redesigns of its apps across desktop, web, mobile and tablet. It's a big enough release that after years within app stores, the mobile versions are going to hit version 1.0 at last.
Previewed to Wired.co.uk at Spotify's Stockholm headquarters ahead of the announcement, the redesign -- dubbed "Cat" within the company -- has the colour black as a core obsession. "We have this metaphor of stepping into a theatre -- when you dim the lights, the content comes forward," Michelle Kadir, director of product development at Spotify, told Wired.co.uk. "We wanted to use that for ourselves and the product."
The redesign, which will affect iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone, Android, Windows, OS X and web browsers, is designed to feel consistent across all available platforms. A simpler aesthetic appears across all devices, with new icons designed by UK-based artist Jon Hicks. Other consistencies now present include all photos of artists or users appearing within circles, whereas all albums and songs appear as squares -- no rounding of album artwork edges or confusion over who's an artist and who's a user (true, these days you could be both).
New features
With the new design comes the de-emphasising of the "Starred Items" functionality and the employment of a new feature called "My Music." Kadir explains the decision: "We now have 'plus' buttons on every single artist, track and album that you can save, without having to think about which playlist you want to save it to. You just press plus on the track you want to keep and it will end up in a list called 'Songs'. The same goes for albums."
The result is a menu that collects and organises favourites outside of playlists. For example, pressing "plus" on the song
Belief by Arcane Roots will place that song under the "Songs" tab of the My Music area. But Arcane Roots will also then appear under "Artists" and the album the song is taken from,
Blood & Chemistry, under "Albums". From there songs can be shuffled, stored for offline playback or added into new or existing playlists.
"It's a much more frictionless way of saving music and we know our users want it," said Kadir. "It's been highly requested. We think it's the perfect complement to playlists -- sometimes you don't know where you want something, you just want to save it.
There are a lot of users that want to save albums as playlists so for them we've made life a lot easier."
Starred items will remain, and existing users with a starred items playlist won't find their lists gone. "You can still add songs to your starred list," Kadir confirmed.
Spotify's version 1.0 mobile apps feature certain aesthetic touches not present in their web-based and desktop counterparts -- namely blur. For example, the Now Playing screen displays a heavily blurred version of the current song's artwork behind a normal square cover photo. It fills the whole of the phone's screen, behind the fresh iconography, progress bar and lettering (the new font used is Proxima Nova, a sans serif typeface).
It's very "iOS 7-like" to our eyes.
"The whole design team likes what iOS 7 was doing," explained Andreas Holmström, lead communications designer, when asked if the use of blurred artwork was inspired by Apple's aesthetic preferences for its mobile OS. "Blur just makes a lot of sense when you want to fill spaces with content."
The same designs will be present on Android as well. But it hasn't been easy, according to Holmström. "It takes quite a lot of GPU
[graphics processing] power. We actually can't use it as much on desktop platforms because the acceleration is better on phones," he said. "It doesn't scale as well to every type of web browser."
Mobile GPUs beat the web
This is an important subtlety to note, because the desktop Spotify player uses HTML for much of its interface now. "A lot of the views on the desktop player are actually using the same exact web views," said Holmström. "It's mostly just the chrome around it that's different."
The redesign of Spotify has taken over six months to complete. "We have millions and millions of users and [their] usage to look at," said Kadir. "We saw that there were some things we could do better. We started mid-summer last year, thinking 'it's time that we do this'. Then we did design exploration and feedback, and then we built it. "We see [creating a new unified aesthetic across apps] as a first big step of many during this year."
Spotify's new apps will be available later today on iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone, Android, Windows, OS X and web browsers.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
