User Experience - the example of Spotify's Mobile app
Context
When driving, sometimes my kids ask me for my phone to play some music through the car's audio. We do it using Spotify (and Bluetooth obviously).
The problem
Whenever I pick up my phone the day after and start using Spotify (e.g. to listen to music or podcast while running), I add a few episodes/songs to my queue, start an episode, and then go running.
But after the first song/episode is finished, I end up listening to one of my kids' music... which is not exactly what I was waiting for (nor is it my taste).
Solving it
That thing kept driving me crazy, as I usually had to hit "next song" a couple of (or many) times before having my episode.
"Hum, must be the kids who put a lot of stuff in the queue" I thought. Easy to fix, right?
Well, when looking at Spotify's UI, it took me some time to find it!
When you look at the below, it is not necessarily easy to spot the "queue" icon,
so I also looked in the options (the ... menu), but couldn't find it either:
Then I saw this "burger" icon (the one next to the Share button), and when clicking on it, it finally showed me the queue:
Not easy to find. But it gets worse: when I initially encountered that issue,
I'm pretty sure there was an option to "empty the queue" in one go, but I can't
find it anymore.
The only option now is to select each song manually, then hit the "REMOVE"
option which appears at the bottom of the screen...
Edit: I had the above issue because the queue was playing from a playlist, and not from manually added songs. When adding songs, I got the "Clear queue" option displayed correctly.
Wrap Up
OK, I know I'm ranting against what looks to be a small thing - and it probably is, but finding this queue shouldn't be that hard - especially when the Spotify app gets updated pretty much every week or so! (upcoming article about the insane number of updates on mobile apps).
Fun Fact
I wrote that post yesterday, and as I was checking it for typos today, I saw an
email from Spotify informing me that the Premium Family subscription price would
be 2€ more expensive starting in September (17.99€ per month instead of 15.99€).
Interesting timing ;)
Tags: Music