Using a Server-Driven UI to create personalized and dynamic user screens
We enabled SoundCloud users have personalized screens instead of the same experience across all users.
The story
SoundCloud’s Search and Recommendation teams wanted to run experiments and ship features without the dependencies on client engineers. These teams wanted to be able to manage what content and what components to show on the Home and Search screen via Backend.
Think-it’s role
We took a leading role within the team to drive forward the product and reach a mature phase.
- We invented a versioning mechanism to avoid application crashes.
- We created an abstract tracking mechanism that is fully flexible to allow triggering tracking events from the SDUI architecture.
- We helped and onboarded SoundCloud engineers to get familiar with the architecture.



Why it mattered
By enabling this control over the backend SoundCloud can start experimenting with dynamic layouts introducing concepts of personalization when rendering pages to the user instead of having a fixed structure of what the user interacts with. Server Driven UI (SDUI) enables faster iteration and move business logic to a centralized location in the backend.
Testimonials