I thought that they removed the shuffle album button after Adele rose a stink [0]? It was cool to see them make that change - but its a mystery how they got in that state in the first place.

My biggest gripe with Spotify is around their implementation of Play Next and the Queue - which makes it difficult to navigate some of my most basic user journeys. The way it works is:

Current playing song -> Queue -> Play Next

My CUJs that go south with this are:

  - I want to play a song after the current one, but there are already things in my queue. I can only add to the end of my queue, so I have to do that and drag it to the top.
  - I press play on an album to listen to it (and it gets added to my Play Next). I then want to queue up another album after the one that I'm listening to, but the only option is to add it to my Queue. I then have to go and add all of the current songs in my Play Next to my Queue before adding the new album to my Queue.
  - I open my app and press play on album. It will play the first song before starting to play the songs in my Queue from the last time I was using Spotify. I apparently needed to clear my Queue the first thing when getting on.

There are certain things in the UI that signal to me that the abstraction might be confusing them as well - such as when right clicking on songs to remove them from Play Next, the option reads "Remove from Queue". What the heck...

I feel like Google Play got this part of the UI right, with (IIRC) a single queue and treating it as double ended. They exposed both a "Play Next" and "Queue" options on their catalog - and the Play Next functionality would put the song/album at the _beginning_ of your Queue. Clicking play on an album wiped your Queue and filled it with just the single album. Maybe that's just where my expectations for how this sort of UX should work were made, but it made sense to me :)

[0] https://theconversation.com/adele-has-successfully-asked-spo...