Spotify “Play Next” Button

And how it can change your world.

Woodrow Smith
4 min readJun 10, 2021

Many of you have been asked to play a song for someone using Spotify. I’m sure you have. We have all been in that position. And what’s the worst that can happen? The song they request is at the bottom of the queue because, of course, other people asked to hear their songs too. But one person gets very impatient. They requested to listen to their music 10 minutes ago. Everyone else seems impartial about the order of the songs being played, except this one person. They come to you and ask if you heard them 3 different times. Every time, you tell them, “Yes, I heard you. Your song will play soon.” But that impatient person is starting to get upset. So you see them coming up to ask a fourth time. “Enough is enough,” you think to yourself.

Using all your patience, you open the queue and scroll to their song. You hold your finger down on the song to drag it to the top of the queue, and this person will leave you alone. But you drop it on the wrong spot in the queue. In a panic, you quickly press that song. And all the songs that were ahead of that one in the queue disappear. Remember the worst thing that can happen? Well, it just happened. Now all the songs that the other people requested are tossed. The queue is ruined. That queue took hours to build. Each song request was going to the next without a problem. Until you had to move one song to the top of the queue to be played next. That’s where it all went wrong. One slip of the finger to pacify one unsatisfied person just ticked everyone else off.

So, who’s fault was this? The person playing the music? No. The person that was constantly bugging about their song being played. Not their fault either. Who else was involved in this social disaster? The culprit is Spotify. I know Spotify does a lot of good for everyone. But in this specific instance, one person has been embarrassed for one of Spotify’s shortcomings. It should not have been so much trouble to have a song play next. Not only should that outcome be easier to come by, but there should be no opportunities to make a mistake. Especially one that could do the user harm. How can Spotify improve this experience to make sure it does not happen again? Well, the answer is pretty simple: Add a “Play Next” button. Below I have designed a prototype for such a tool. The first time through is how the play next button can be accessed before opening the queue. The second flow starts in the middle of the first and shows how to play a song next via the queue.

I know I have experienced something similar far too many times. I work downtown Athens at a bar where every girl there wants to hear anything by Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo. I swear girls in the bar think every song was written for them. So when I move “Drivers License” to the top of the queue for the fourth time in a night, my fingers might slip and play the opposite of what Becky, Caroline, and Anna want to hear. That results in them leaving the bar and a loss of profit for me. That is a brief explanation of my frustrations towards Spotify that led to the inspiration for creating this feature. It was difficult to really step back and take on Spotify as a whole and create a feature that seemed obvious to me. I have been a Spotify customer for years now, and I think this feature, or a similar one, is long overdue. Below is a customer journey map for the typical Spotify user to help drive home the usefulness of this feature.

Customer Journey Map

Count and see how many similar situations you have been in. If you’re on aux for a road trip, the same thing can happen to you. If you brought the speaker to the pool and someone wants to hear their favorite song, your wet finger might slip and drop the song in the middle of the queue. Music streaming services like Spotify use this feature already. Both Apple Music and Soundcloud both have “Play Next” features. So Spotify should have it as well. Just think of all the times that Spotify users have been trying to move a song to the top of a queue, and slippery fingers caused the entire queue to disappear. That all could have been avoided with this simple yet impactful feature. “Play Next” is the future of Spotify. By giving this common problem a streamline solution, Spotify can ensure the satisfaction of its users.

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