New black UI on Mac is almost unusable

[jonbratseth]

Great, now there's a new release of the Spotify client for Mac again.

I have long ago stopped expecting any improved features or fixes whatsoever, and the 50% chance of freeze and crash on drag-and-drop is also too familiar to raise any eyebrows.

But, this time you also managed to make the UI near night unusable. It's just a mass of blackness with some scattered white text, and no visible indication of which items in a list is marked (adding to the eidting fun of the crashes). This isn't how god intended user interfaces at all.

Is there any secret way to downgrade, or get back the old UI?

Or perhaps this is nature's way of telling me to finally move to Wimp.

[user-removed]

Thanks for feedback, I know that there is a lot complain threads, but at least some thank you threads. Spotify is really looking for any feedbacks to find compromise in new look.

[Td0Sh_V]

I've noticed My Mactop (laptop=) has been freezeing/crashing more so since the black UI update as well—

however, my premium account ended about then too and the player keeps telling me my harddisk is full & proceeds to freeze &&& crash quite often. How do I guilltine this download songs to my computer issue properply*** It seems to be preference option very well hidden or the membership/player sprung one annoying leak. I've deleted all files in the user/library/cache/storage folder many times only for the downloads to redownload on the internal drive until the finder message thing reminds me the computer is packed full & crashes Spotifyagain. =(

I realize my issue is slightly different but its one of those things.   

Thanks & PLease someone have the answer we want =P

_T_

Spoiler

[bruno123]

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@hpguru wrote:

Spotify is really looking for any feedbacks to find compromise in new look.

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@hpguru, I must say I'm impressed by your enthusiasm, but I can't see any evidence that Spotify is willing to make any changes to this new colour scheme (and font size).

We've had some feedback on about making changes about the "Your Music" and starred system, but nothing on the overall darness and readability of the UI. I'm still waiting for some Spotify feedback on this other thread. E-mails to Spotify support have more or less come back with answers along the lines of "get used to it, you're just saying that because it's new, we'll tell you how to use Your Music" and "thank you for your feedback, we'll pass your feedback on to our team". In real terms, the latter means we could have to wait for a couple of years (for those of us who choose to wait).

If you look at the customising skin idea, it was suggested a long time ago and put on hold, not to mention that the "Paint it black" UI was one of the main points of Spotify's latest big PR campain, which might make it difficult to change the strategy (considering that some considerable time, money and effort was visibly put into advertising this).

It looks like basic UI design principles that would have made Spotify Desktop usable in 99% of cases have been sacrificed in the name of that "Paint it black " PR campaign. Granted, the result is visually pretty, and it's probably still usable in a large number of cases (possibly even over 50%), but it's still cutting off a sizable portion of use cases.

When you say "Spotify is really looking for any feedbacks to find compromise in new look", did you get any sort of acknowledgement from people in the Spotify team that there was something wrong with the overall darkness of the new UI, or is it just hopeful talk?

[user-removed]

By feedback they are improving product. It was improved also by feedback from beta testers.

This might sound like joke, but we really tested product that was even worse (background white in many areas in app), this and many others are fixed before final release. So Spotify is listening, keep feedback coming.

[user-removed]

If you have to make the font size bigger for better readability you have a UI design failure, Font sizes should respect the OS settings and DPI settings.

On the average(?) laptop screen 1366x768 the playlist only shows 6-7 items in the list and most columns are not visible. This is not an improvement. I feel like the UI designers targetted this for 5 year olds.

Implementing user selectable themes sounds like the best way to go and pushes development work on the UI over to the users and the users get what they want; Win-win from my point of view.