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Personalized Home Screen Shortcuts

1 post · Mar 2020

What this trail covers

Spotify's Home screen has evolved to include 'Shortcuts,' a dedicated area at the top displaying six personalized tiles (entities) reflecting recent listening habits. This feature aims to improve user experience by providing quick access to familiar music and podcasts, balancing familiarity with freshness. The development involved identifying and quantifying the opportunity, developing recommendation heuristics and models, and performing both offline and online evaluations to reliably recommend content.

All Spotify trails
  1. Reach for the Top: How Spotify Built Shortcuts in Just Six MonthsThis post details the engineering behind Spotify's 'Shortcuts' feature on the Home screen. It covers the initial analysis of user listening habits to understand the opportunity, the development of recommendation heuristics (including decay functions and ranking by play frequency/duration), and the subsequent creation of a neural network-based ML model using TensorFlow. The ML model architecture, which learns event embeddings and scores entities, achieved a 26.7% relative improvement over the heuristic model offline. The post also discusses the validation process through A/B testing and the correlation of offline metrics (like NDCG) with online performance.