Spotify, with all of its simple, retro design and straightforward use case, still finds ways to surprise me.

Last summer I spent an hour or two digging through Spotify’s desktop and mobile apps looking for a very specific feature. The day before, I had been listening to a Spotify radio station while driving and had particularly enjoyed one of the songs. I had forgotten the lyrics and hadn’t recognized the artist, and certainly didn’t want to pick up my phone at the time to save the song, and now I was hunting for it.

Specifically, I was looking for my listening history. I saw rumors of a new feature in the mobile app, but when I looked for the button, I realized I wasn’t yet in that beta group.

I then started digging around on forums, discovering all sorts of interesting workarounds and unexpected behaviors. At the time the Spotify desktop app had a listening history feature, but when I looked, it was completely blank. It turns out it only records songs that one had listened to through the desktop app. The best workaround on desktop was downloading my profile data off of Spotify’s web application and going through my listening data there.

However – and this was so wild to me – someone had built the listening history feature into the Spotify mobile app. It had been snuck into the playlist feature set.

Upon navigating to on of your playlists, click the ‘Add song’ button, swipe left to navigate to one of the rightmost pages to arrive at the ‘Recently played songs’ page (illustration below).

I found my song, and was perfectly happy, even despite losing a few hours going down that rabbit hole. However, I was floored the next time I opened the Spotify app, and saw a timer icon on my homepage that had not been there the prior time.

I had been enrolled in the new listening history feature. I was immensely delighted – I felt rewarded for my efforts – and admired the clever way of adding more people to the beta group for the feature.

The feature has since been shipped, but the complexity of the different apps and features in the Spotify ecosystem stuck with me.

Spotify surprises haven’t always ended in delight and awe, however.

This morning I found a new feature for playlists – Enhance. I clicked on it, thinking it would download a higher quality audio file than usual. I didn’t notice the toast (image below) and was shocked when I started seeing Spotify add bad music songs to my playlist.

After going through my settings and Googling it did I realize that the Enhance hadn’t anything to do with audio quality and instead toggled on the playlist suggestions from Spotify.

I think the problems here are two: one, ‘Enhance’ seems to be an odd word choice for adding music to a playlist and thus changing the playlist, and two, a toast wasn’t sufficient for me to notice or understand the new feature.

Although I always love discovering new features, Spotify should think about introducing new UI features in a more systematic way. These were subtle additions to the UI and even when I pressed them it wasn’t quite clear what they would do or eventually did. “Onboarding” can’t just be reserved for a user’s first time on the app; it needs to extend to additions of novel and/or complex features.