> Give me labels. If labels don't fit your motif then get better designers.
That's unhelpful and unreasonable, particularly on mobile.
There's no room on Spotify for labels behind every button, for instance.
Not if you want room to show the cover art, which I do.
It's not a question about "better designers" -- space constraints are real, and sometimes you really need things available at a single tap. I don't want shuffle to be buried behind a pop-up menu.
I just opened Spotify on my iPhone mini, just to check, and I really have to disagree. Spotify has TONS of wasted space. Even when you do want to pull up the "extra" menus (which is frequent for me, since it seems like that's the only place to get to the album for a given song), they practically throw the space away. The hamburger menu can only fit two items on its list of 10, because they waste so much space. I'm sorry, but 10 options can easily all be visible simultaneously while still showing the current context of that menu (the song).
But that ethos abounds. They hid all the controls, and make many of the controls that they do show ambiguous. Am I going to be shuffle-play on the queue? Is my queue currently autogenerating songs at its end or is it going to stop at the end of queue? And long presses / hovers provide zero extra information for what the unlabeled buttons mean / do.
I'm pretty satisfied with Spotify UI on the whole, mostly because of how easy they make it to toss the currently playing song around to different devices and they handle shared control well, but I do wish it didn't require three taps and a scroll (in a context where it's not even obvious that scrolling is possible, because the list is so sparse that it doesn't look like there are any more items at the end) to get to an album, which is almost always the context in which I want to listen to a search result.
By that same token, if I'm tapping the screen on the go, on a bumpy bus, I'd prefer for the control to be visible and for the screen to be unscrollable / locked in place. But I'll concede the point.
That's unhelpful and unreasonable, particularly on mobile.
There's no room on Spotify for labels behind every button, for instance.
Not if you want room to show the cover art, which I do.
It's not a question about "better designers" -- space constraints are real, and sometimes you really need things available at a single tap. I don't want shuffle to be buried behind a pop-up menu.