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Quick Switcher Performance and Personalization

1 post · Jan 2016

What this trail covers

This thread tracks the evolution of Slack's Quick Switcher, focusing on improving its performance and personalization. Initial posts detailed the original Quick Switcher and its limitations. This post details a significant rewrite to address performance issues, reducing open times from seconds to milliseconds through optimizations like lazy loading unread channels, templated HTML, and prefetched data. It also introduces 'frecency' (frequency + recency) to personalize search results based on user history, and enhances search matching with graph-based algorithms for more flexible substring and initial matching. Future posts will cover mobile app integration and other UI enhancements.

All Slack trails
  1. A faster, smarter Quick SwitcherThis post details a rewrite of the Quick Switcher to address performance and personalization. Performance improvements include: 1. Limiting initial display to 24 unread channels/DMs. 2. Templatizing HTML and reducing DOM elements. 3. Prefetching search data and using a more efficient sorting algorithm. This resulted in median render times of 7ms. Personalization is achieved through 'frecency', a scoring system based on frequency and recency of user interactions, with a formula balancing total count and recency. A bonus system was added to improve matching for partial names. Search matching was re-architected as a graph search for more flexible substring and initial matching.