Ask HN: What should the back button do after a queued Spotify song?

[minzi]

Suppose you add a few songs to your queue in Spotify. When the first song you added finishes, you hit the back the button. Instead of playing the song that just finished it plays whatever album or playlist you were in before queuing songs.

Is this the behavior you want? I’m asking out of curiosity more than anything else. I often see people make this mistake of trying to go backward in the songs they’ve queued and finding out that they can’t. Personally, I think it’s more intuitive to have the back button always take me to the song that was just playing. I want to be clear that I’m asking what you would prefer not what you think is technically correct.

Also, is this how things work in Apple Music as well?

[sdeep27]

Was searching for this behavior and pleasantly surprised to find such a recent thread about it. I agree with you as well. I think they don’t do it because of what the other viewer mentioned where there is unexpected complexity in the state.

[drewbeck]

I agree with you, fully. “Back” should always take you to the previous song played. It creates a slightly odd situation if you go back a few times when playing from the queue — do you re-queue the tracks? I say yes, but I can see why this could possibly make for an odd state.

Still, “back” taking me to a song I didn’t just play, or to nothing (which happens if you’ve just been playing queue I think?) is a broken experience and throws me off every time.

Signed, a UX professional

[slater]

it should go back to the previous page. sites shouldn't fuck with the browser's built-in functionalities.

[minzi]

Sorry if what I wrote was unclear, but I mean the back button in the spotify player. The buttons that are used to "rewind", "go to previous song", "skip song", etc.