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Spotify: New Design. Ugly

-BigMac-

-BigMac-

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Apr 15, 2011
2,504
2,925
Melbourne, Australia
Hi Guys.

Am i the only one who thinks the new Spotify Design does not blend in with the Mac UI, and looks more like a windows media player 11 rip off?

Sure theyre going for the minimalist look, but given the current appearance of Mavericks, the design of Spotify clashes with everything on the rest of the system.

It bothers me so much i am contemplating unsubscribing off premium and switching to itunes.

Anyone else feeling this strongly about the new design?

Thanks :)
 
Last edited:
mojolicious said:
It may be busy, ugly, and difficult to navigate.

But it's cleaner, more attractive, and more intuitive than iTunes 11.
Click to expand...

Maybe cleaner, but i dont think clean should outweigh practicality.

On my retina 15, this is all i see at retina res. 9 songs at a time. that is not practical.


7Ftmyxy.jpg
 
Ah right, we've not yet had that inflicted upon us here in the UK.

It looks like they hired in help from both the iTunes and Flickr design teams...
 
I don't like that there is no option for a bright skin. The dark is a bit too dark for my taste. It is also very space inefficient. Much worse than the old.
Generally I like the look.

I just wish I could switch to a black text on light background version of it and that the space between lines is shrunk so more songs actually fit on the screen.

It is okay otherwise and the functionality is the same as the old. It is very much a Windows 8 modern UI kind of flat skin and also the title fonts but it fits well in OSX, much better than the old one from a style perspective. The line spacing annoys me though.
 
dusk007 said:
I don't like that there is no option for a bright skin. The dark is a bit too dark for my taste. It is also very space inefficient. Much worse than the old.
Generally I like the look.

I just wish I could switch to a black text on light background version of it and that the space between lines is shrunk so more songs actually fit on the screen.

It is okay otherwise and the functionality is the same as the old. It is very much a Windows 8 modern UI kind of flat skin and also the title fonts but it fits well in OSX, much better than the old one from a style perspective. The line spacing annoys me though.
Click to expand...

the line spacing annoys me too.. can see nearly 20 songs at once in itunes, 8-9 in spotify..
 
Spotify is a cross platform app and works on many devices. They have their own identity and design which is uniform across them. I don't understand why peoples complaints include the fact that it may not fit in with the current OSX design.
 
StevenB14 said:
Spotify is a cross platform app and works on many devices. They have their own identity and design which is uniform across them. I don't understand why peoples complaints include the fact that it may not fit in with the current OSX design.
Click to expand...

Well, that's always an interesting topic, user experience-wise. When you design a cross-platform system, do you design it to fit in with each system that it runs on, or do you use your own visual style across all platforms?

Both have advantages and disadvantages, and sometimes people change their minds. For example, iTunes on Windows has always looked like an OS X application. It doesn't fit in with Windows. But one of Apple's marketing strategies to Windows users was "If you can use iTunes, you can use a Mac". So iTunes on Windows is designed to get people used to the OS X interface. On the other hand, Safari 3 for Windows looked exactly like Safari for Mac. But Safari 4 and 5 for Windows looked like native Windows applications.

Designing your own cross-platform visual style works well if you have good designers, but it does mean that your application doesn't quite "fit in" with any of the platforms it runs on.

Spotify is an example of something that has its own cross-platform visual language. At the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Netflix. The browsing interface for Netflix looks totally different on the iPad compared to Windows 8 Metro.

I'm sure the new Spotify design isn't actually that bad. It's just jarring. It's a massive change. And it doesn't quite fit in with Mac OS X.

I'll be interested to see what OS X Syrah looks like, once details start leaking.
 
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