One of the challenges of the "New My Wave" project: how do you make it clear that the recommendation system is a multiverse? The technologi…

One of the challenges of the "New My Wave" project: how do you make it clear that the recommendation system is a multiverse? The technological shift of the new MW is from an exact personalized queue of tracks that match the mood to the understanding that despite a similar data context, a person may be in a different mood, with a different request. The My Wave multiverse is an assumption about possible shades of a person's mood and hypotheses about what context the listener is in. Or what context they want to enter Here are my examples: • yes, on some weekdays at this time I work, on other days I run my workouts (hi Coach Bennett! I am still on the distance) • Sometimes classical music helps me focus at work, sometimes it just plays at home in the background The music is the same - the contexts are different. The context repeats - the music choice is different. And always around the value of "How well it (My Wave) understands me!" We were looking for a way to let a person see the multiverse. It is important to preserve the feeling of simplicity. My Wave is valuable because it is one-button: press and get a mood. To bring the impression of "How well it understands me" one step earlier, before the flow starts playing. Creating a "showcase", branching decisions, and catalog-like interfaces killed the feeling of immersion in My Wave. Browsing showcases and lists is a transition from the intent "I entrust my mood" to the intent "I choose" To keep the balance, I came up with a requirement for the future solution: the feeling of interacting with My Wave should be like the feeling from hyper-casual games. Its own character of interaction, not a feed, and importantly: tolerance and friendliness toward exploring contexts. We knew that some people were afraid to skip tracks, fearing they would lose "that very thing". Playing with contexts dispels that fear. A property of recommendation systems that probably everyone has experienced: once you go in one direction, the whole system tunes itself to one tone: watch motorcycle racing on Instagram - your whole feed is motorcycle racing. Look at jewelry on Pinterest - jewelry everywhere. We need to invent a way to make curiosity safe That is how context forks were born. We created a new interaction pattern with a complex recommendation system Celebrating curiosity in two steps: • without calls to action, we show alternative branches of My Wave. For example, simply seeing "Walking the dog" in the drum for a dog owner creates that same "How well you understand me!" effect • the spinning game mechanic, unusual for utilitarian interfaces, creates a feeling of curiosity