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giltwist t1_jc0ipbv wrote

> Open Spotify once the revamp is complete, and your home screen could autoplay a video podcast you might like

Ack! No. Autoplay bad. How has NO company learned this?

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TechnoEchoes t1_jc3vicr wrote

Despite what your personal opinion is of autoplay, there’s mountains of evidence that it increases engagement and time spent in the app, which are key performance metrics. That’s true across all streaming and social media platforms.

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Sixcoup t1_jc1ziu8 wrote

Because this isn't bad at all. It sucks for the user, but it generates more profits. And that's the only thing they care about.

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GrouchyDirection7201 t1_jby6bmr wrote

The answer is more nuanced than "some lazy leadership/siloed blah blah". Finding attention-holding UX patterns are HARD, especially on Mobile devices that compete with attention not just with other apps but also the user's external environment - you could look away from the screen due to any small reason. Hence, any pattern that is proven to work (e.g. TikTok's vertical content + scroll + personalized algorithms) tends to be copied. Its a paradigm that users already are familiar with, so the adoption+onboarding "cost" is lower.

Source - drove a redesign for an award winning Mobile app few years ago. Didnt work because it served retail which was hard hit by covid at the time.

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Mental-Aioli3372 t1_jbyarr1 wrote

>Finding attention-holding UX patterns are HARD,

Is holding the users attention in the Spotify UI contributing to a significant part of the value users derive from Spotify as a service?

Edit: service > derive

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GrouchyDirection7201 t1_jbyb8mo wrote

Nope, it's that they seek entertainment value elsewhere off-Spotify.

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Mental-Aioli3372 t1_jbyc10x wrote

I think that's a fair and accurate description of the actual motivations.

It really does seem like a short sighted attempt to capitalize on the success of other mediums at the expense of the actual value their service and app provides.

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GrouchyDirection7201 t1_jbz8uqy wrote

Assuming they made a blind change. This design must have gone through a humongous validation phase to assess customer reactions

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aaOzymandias t1_jc1qbgy wrote

Spotify should play music, not hold my attention. It is shit design.

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GrouchyDirection7201 t1_jc2qhop wrote

Yeah, it helps it you think about this as a case.

Its Q3 2022. Spotify has spent $XM on loyalties, exclusive artists deals (e.g. Joe Rogan) etc. The overall user growth listening to this music and podcasts we paid for is decreasing. We forsee our users ignoring Spotify and prefering to spend time on TikTok, Insta etc for entertainment, curate music taste etc. We want to double down on user engagement and get users interested in Spotify. You are the PM in charge of the new Spotify. What do you do?

If your answer is "spend more money on music and stream that" - we already spent a lot, and not all artists are willing to sign Spotify deals.

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DrQuantum t1_jby5mba wrote

The reason is because UI is never a company wide decision. They have a department for it, and what are they going to do once a design is finalized? Sit around? Quit and not get paid? They will keep trying to innovate even though design is not necessarily something that can always be innovated in that way.

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codersfocus t1_jbzx3ez wrote

They could improve their existing fucking app. Literally unsubscribed from Spotify last month because they don't have a "don't play this song" feature.

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DrQuantum t1_jc059ew wrote

Do you normally listen through the weekly recommendations or radio or what?

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codersfocus t1_jc0i5dp wrote

When I looked into it, their computer app which I used didn't have the feature at all. Disabling songs was only available on mobile, but even that would only disable it on that specific phone -- not account wide.

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fishyfishyfish1 t1_jbzgmrj wrote

I personally HATE the new Spotify look and function

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stew_going t1_jdafhu6 wrote

Same! I just realized the redesign yesterday, it is so damn frustrating. The home page is literally useless to me as it is now, I'll never use it. I'm not going to sit here scrolling for songs aimlessly.

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Art-Zuron t1_jby0aon wrote

I figure it's because they just all sort of distill down their UIs until it's the most fecking awful possible design literally ever.

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stew_going t1_jdai0o5 wrote

The worst redesign. I can't frickin use the home page anymore, it's useless to me. I'm never going to waste my time scrolling for music like that.

1

Monsterdongfinder676 t1_jbzyi6x wrote

Any idiot can make an App only a genius can make it work 😂

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Mapmaker51 t1_jbxx1c2 wrote

"Why are so many apps going for the same look"

Frameworks, programmers are too lazy/incompetent and companies too money hungry to do stuff on their own so, it's why eventually every app will look the same, same reason as to why browsers look so similar, they all run on Chromium.

Or why all websites tried to force the same theme including Reddit's new theme, because they were all trying to force in similar frameworks like React/Angular onto their website, before that it was bootstrap and so on.

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CowRepresentative820 t1_jby2utn wrote

React itself has nothing to do with theming. Also, in larger companies, design and development are usually spread across separate teams. The "lazy programmers" usually don't actually decide what the UI will look like. To be honest, your comments feel very uninformed.

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Mapmaker51 t1_jby3yck wrote

Right, and Java has nothing to do with most Java desktop applications looking the same and win32 programs also had nothing to do with them having around the same interface, after all they're all just meant to be frameworks to build a program on right? what should they have anything to do with the apps themselves looking a certain similar way with each other

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CowRepresentative820 t1_jby730n wrote

You specifically mentioned React, which is what I'm responding to, but yes, using UI frameworks like JavaFX, Win32, GTK will cause your apps to look a specific way. However, while React itself may be a UI framework, in the web world, styling is done through CSS. It is not React's concern.

If you know of the UI framework that all these companies are using to achieve similar layouts, I'd be very interested in seeing what specifically that is.

Also your not wrong about browsers looking the same, but that's not out of laziness (not sure if that was implied). These days browsers are so complicated that there probably won't every be a new browser developed. It's just Chrome and Firefox, which is a little bit scary IMO.

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darkkite t1_jbyeyl8 wrote

a lazy programmer wouldn't want to redesign a functional app as now they have to do more work and fix broken tests.

designers implement ui then they're built

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Smurf-Sauce t1_jbyej3y wrote

Everybody is missing an obvious cause for the UI “sameness”: UI/UX is a discipline that optimizes for certain features, typically user engagement and ease of use. Once the optimal patterns are found, they will be implemented across the board.

For comparison, every nation on the planet has very, very similar traffic laws and signage/symbology. The optimal way to control traffic has been found, so everybody uses it. Imagine if every country had their own unique signage, road markings, right of way rules, etc. You would have to study and relearn everything every time you drove somewhere new.

Furthermore, nobody can explain why having UI “sameness” is a problem at all. Why should UI theory be re-invented from scratch for every app and website? Isn’t it better for them all to use a common visual language so users can jump into them intuitively and focus on getting tasks done rather than learning thousands of different UIs?

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