So I’ve spent 3 days using the new Spotify UI on macOS. A quick rundown of how I use Spotify:

• I listen to one podcast every once in awhile
• I always listen to the Spotify curated playlists for Discover Weekly and Release Radar and sometimes the daily mixes or other suggested playlists
• My regular listening is often playing from my Liked Songs playlist
• I don’t listen to full albums much and listen to a lot of single tracks from searches
• I rarely use the song radio feature
• I never use the queue feature

Based on my use cases, the UI changes have proven to be a minimal interruption and I actually quite enjoy the new UI. I’ve made a list of likes and dislikes:

Likes

• Spacing and line height gives the UI a refreshed feel and feels less congested (especially on playlist views)

• I like the addition of the search icon for playlist filters - it’s satisfying to click that and filter playlists based on my input (I was always hunting for the filter field in the previous UI because if you blinked, you’d miss it)

• I like that for curated playlists if I heart a song, there’s a nice green heart icon that immediately tells me I’ve hearted the song

• I like the hover actions on DW and RR curated playlists to like or dislike quickly

• I like the playing animation that appears next to the currently playing song in playlists

• It feels faster each time I change screens

• I like the various sorting options for Playlists, Artists, and Albums

Dislikes

• I don’t like how they removed the persistent top search bar and relegated it to the sidebar, effectively requiring me to switch my view state - would be good if this was a togglable option

• Not crazy about the playlist icon changes - the angled images look weird against the gradient background (as seen when you go to the new Search page)

• Seems weird to have featured content above artists, albums, etc. on the search results page when searching for an artist - I feel like that content should be underneath artist/album results

Overall I like the design changes and still appreciate the value Spotify gives me.