Because I thought that creating the Spotify Player extension would be as simple as building a UI and integrating with the API. Fortunately, Spotify provides the Web API endpoints to control the state of the application.Īt first, I used JS, HTML & CSS to set up a simple development.

To control the state of the Spotify application via web extension, I needed a way to tell the Spotify application that I want to update the state, e.g from playing to pausing the song. Navigate to the Spotify web player with that song nameįrom there I can add the song to my playlist.Right-click on the song, select item search in Spotify.

Here are the steps that I found optimal & natural:

If it is possible, how can I make it natural for users?.

Is it possible to find a song in Spotify while I am on the current page (where I found the song)?.

Finding an optimal way to do this is required so as to reduce switching context (which can lead to lost focus).

Go to Spotify desktop app or web playerĪs you can see, it takes a few steps and we have to switch context (open the web player with a new tab or switch to the desktop app) to achieve the goal.

Sometimes, we unintentionally find a good melody on youtube or some other websites and we want to find that song in Spotify to add to a playlist. The goal of the Spotify extension is to provide basic features that allow the user to quickly and easily control the Spotify app. UX / UI How many features does it support?

Then you can maybe add it to a playlist later. So for example, if you hear a tune on Youtube you can quickly search it on Spotify without navigating away from your current window. This extension also has another nifty feature with a quick right-click on the widget, you can search a song by name.

However, using the simple extension that we created, we can eliminate the need to navigate away from your current window to control Spotify. Furthermore, we can lose focus or get distracted once we navigate away from our current window and open Spotify. When we are working or just browsing the web it is inconvenient to have to toggle between windows in order to control the music that is playing. Special thanks to Ben, Jacky, Minh, Tony, and Thach for making this possible! Motivation

Spotify player web