I read a great book once about how to be more mindful when processing information + compensating for biases–both your own, and those present in the information. One technique is to always evaluate incoming information relative to an expected baseline.
Years of working on and releasing software has taught me that there’s a set of people who hate UI changes by default. These people will be triggered no matter what you change. The now playing screen is especially likely to draw ire because we changed the meaning of a fairly large “hit area” at the bottom of the screen and made it do something different from before. Some people were angry the moment they clicked the info at the bottom of the screen + didn’t see the play queue–everything that comes after that is tainted by that anger.
Tesla just went through this with their V8->V9 update a few months ago. The new version is immensely better. More elegant, more unified, easier to use, and more scalable across their product line, but lots and lots of people are spewing vitriol about it and they will until they get used to it. By then they will be ready to hate the next version.
To be clear, there’s been a lot of good, detailed, constructive feedback also, and we are going to act on it. We appreciate the people who have taken the time to explain what is wrong for them clearly and thoughtfully. There’s also a lot of expected fog to wade through–the back-seat driving, insults, hyperbole, condescension, “I could have designed this better”, “fire your design team”, etc…all of that is part of the baseline/expected noise. It doesn’t really land–someone was going to say all of that no matter what we released.