Baidu Social App
UX / UI DESIGN
Multi-interest community
Baidu Tieba is an interactive platform that gathers like-minded people with interest themes, it uses forums called "Bars" as a place for users to socially interact. The slogan of Baidu Tieba is "Born for your interest" (Chinese: 为兴趣而生). Since its birth in 2003, Tieba has registered a total of 1.5 billion users and created more than 23 million interest groups. Which covered a variety of topics, such as news, science, celebrities, films, comics, and books. More than one billion posts have been published in these Bars.
According to Alexa Internet, traffic to Baidu Tieba makes up more than 10% of the total traffic to Baidu properties.
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ROLE
Senior UX / UI Designer
OKR
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Improve user Experience
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Improve user duration
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Improve user retention rate
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Improve product commercialization value
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Improving consistency
Objectives #1
Improve User Experience
For a community-based product, in addition to the value of the content, the user experience is also extremely important.
As the largest and oldest integrated community-based product in Asia, PasteBar faces both internal and external challenges.
• On the one hand, emerging short video content platforms such as Douyin have captured a large amount of users' time, and Tieba needs to find breakthroughs at a new level in order to enhance the Market Segment of the product.
• On the other hand, the majority of posting users are 90s and 00s, and the younger generation has distinctive characteristics that emphasise self-perception and a high emotional threshold, and therefore needs to continuously upgrade the experience for the target users.
Acttion
Focus on user research
As a member of the UX design team, I will conduct competitive analysis, experience maps, scenario analysis and brainstorming after the PM has proposed the product design requirements. In the middle of the product design, I will use usability testing, eye-movement testing, A/B testing and Heuristic Evaluation as tools to conduct research and invite the demand side to participate in the research and analyse the results, and if there is a demand, I will quickly iterate and produce new revisions or new hypotheses. In the later stages of product design I work closely with data analysts and user researchers to track effectiveness and review projects, so that each project becomes a building block for the next iteration.
Key Result
Case Study - Creating a community with a sense of 'companionship'
The "sense of companionship"" means "being welcomed, cared for and valued" and can be achieved by "shaping a product-friendly first impression", "conversational design" and "helpful priming of newcomers".
In a version update led by the design department, we proposed a design strategy based on the results of user research, and based on this we explored and produced solutions.
The data backend will intelligently sort the groups that users interact with the most based on their preferences and browsing time. In terms of visual design, the "frequently visited communities/groups" will be turned into a more attractive card design, thus reinforcing the feeling of being cared for and valued by users.
From the "frequently visited bars" to the home page of the group, the visual perception dimension is strongly correlated to strengthen the overall nature of the bar.
Objectives #2
Improve user duration and retention rate
Internet user growth has slowed down and the number of apps has increased year after year, leading to increasing competition between apps. As part of the UX team, I work closely with product managers, data research, and user researchers and am responsible for the growth of the data.
In the update to version 6.0, we have raised two issues.
• How might we get new users to be attracted to better quality content the first time they use a posting
• How might we get regular users to stay longer when they first open the posting bar each day.
After research, both problems point to one solution；
Redesigning the presentation of content.
Objectives #2
Improve user duration and retention rate
Internet user growth has slowed down and the number of apps has increased year after year, leading to increasing competition between apps. As part of the UX team, I work closely with product managers, data research, and user researchers and am responsible for the growth of the data.
In the update to version 6.0, we have raised two issues.
• How might we get new users to be attracted to better quality content the first time they use a posting
• How might we get regular users to stay longer when they first open the posting bar each day.
After research, both problems point to one solution；
Redesigning the presentation of content.
Objectives #3
Improve product commercialization value
A year later, I was called to the revenue team. During my time in Ad UX, I focused on creating a more human experience for advertisers, while also trying to strike a balance between user experience and business value. While I cannot share all of my work, here are some of the projects I was the lead on:
Key Result #3-1
Making complex data easier to understand
I started talking to a number of advertisers to find out what data was most important to them from their perspective. I decided to solve this problem by creating a comprehensive page with a summary page that visualizes the most important data.
It took multiple rounds of user testing and many iterations for the Display summary project to launched. Along the way I worked with the data visualization engineering team. The final result was a simple, clean, and visually driven single-page summary that showed only the most important insights and allowed advertisers to dive in deeper if required.
Key Result #3-2
Custom design for advertisers
I work with advertisers to develop campaigns that help them engage consumers with innovative, tailor-made experiences at multiple stages of the marketing funnel. This custom advertising solution became a way to get their clients to build brand awareness, consideration and conversion.
I also built the Ad package, if away for a brand to enhance the customer experience proves to be effective but not included in our existing suite of advertising products, I’ll work with our sales and engineers to build it.
Key Result #3-3
Contributing to the material design specs
As I chatted with advertisers, another issue came to the surface: they expressed great confusion about the display size specifications of their ads. In many cases, their images were being over-cropped or compressed because they didn't know the sizes supported by the Tieba app.
I realized that this was because the "image sizing guidelines" in the Ad system were not updated in time for product updates.
I decided to clean up the ineffective sizes, simplify the unused sizes, and put together a brand new "Ad Image Size Guide".
Due to confidentiality limitations on data, I cannot share the numbers, but the results project proved that design can directly impact the performance of the ads.