Carleton University - School of Computer Science Honours Project
Summer 2022
Server Driven UI Architecture on the Shop App
SCS Honours Project Image
ABSTRACT
This project focuses on the Server-Driven UI project I championed, as part of my third Dev Degree placement on the Shop Store team at Shopify. The Shop Store team is responsible for managing the buyer experience of the Store Screen on the Shop App and the display logic for shopping features previously followed a client-driven architecture. This client-driven approach hindered the experimentation and customization of merchant stores since this implementation rendered the same layout for all merchants. The Server-Driven UI architecture described in this project enables merchant stores to be customized based on their needs, since the back-end server informs the mobile client which layout components to render for each store. This architecture also enables the Shop App to provide a more individualized experience for new and returning buyers, while also enabling the Shop Store team to conduct multiple experiments with varying layout templates to find out what gets buyers engaged. The Server-Driven UI architecture provides a system that can extend across multiple surfaces and enables the Shop Store team to build for the future of the Shop App.