[evanriley]

I think people are getting confused, and the title of the news reports aren't helping.

Spotify didn't take away the ability to shuffle on album pages, they just changed the "default". In their mobile app the large green bottom under the album cover and to the right used to play the album but would turn on shuffle, and it now just plays the album.

If you look at the now playing song, the shuffle button is still there.

This button: https://0x0.st/-7Hd.jpeg

[JohnJamesRambo]

Yep this seems like a good thing and fixing a UI issue that was wrong in the first place.

[beermonster]

I don’t understand the logic behind that default. Why shuffle by default rather than play in order? It’s good they’ve fixed it , though not sure it should’ve been fixed just because Adele tweeted them!

[Spivak]

Hey, whatever gets fixes off the Spotify community forums is a win in my book.

And the answer is that it’s a consistency thing. Playlists usually make more sense when shuffled and there’s some value in making sure the big green button has consistent behavior whenever it appears. Without a good reason, like a high profile artist complaining about it, there’s not much motivation to change it.

[4926394057]

I seem to recall it being an incentive to upgrade to the paid plan. If you were a free user you couldn't choose which song on an album to listen to, you could only kick off shuffling and hope the song you wanted to hear came up. If you had a paid account you could play the album through in order or any particular song of your choosing. I've been paying long enough now though that I could very well be mis-remembering it...

[MaxDPS]

I’m guessing the logic is that having play by default (like it is now) in a way duplicates the action on the UI. If you want to play the album in order and you are already on the album page, you can simply press on the first track and let it go from there. Now, pressing on the first track and pressing play do the same thing.

[Hamuko]

Does Spotify still have 3-4 play buttons visible on the UI? Feels like the user interface isn't too well thought out.

https://twitter.com/AS1F_IQ/status/1404744877892456448

[_fat_santa]

I actually really like it when companies do this. Different people will access the same feature in different ways, from different places. Much like there are multiple ways to open a file in VSCode, it's not that the UI is poorly thought out, it's very well thought out and gives users multiple ways of doing a thing.

[runj__]

Two of those are just indicators of what playlist and song is playing, sort of like pwd, sure you can press them to pause but that's hidden functionality. The top and bottom pause buttons are for people who don't know about keyboard shortcuts and don't want to move their mouse all the way up or down the app.

[kgeist]

Our product has a similar feature - several buttons in different places which do the same thing. Our UX designer explained that different users expect to find the button in different places, so they put it in all of them.

[whimsicalism]

But they said in the article that it would continue shuffling on playlists, but that button does not shuffle on playlists for me either.

I seem to recall that it used to shuffle, which is why I no longer ever use it, but that does not seem to be the case anymore.

[evanriley]

The button with shuffle set to default is still there for me on playlist, and does indeed still shuffle the playlist. If it isn't for you its possibly a bug I would guess.