These were designed in 2014.

V1.0

Content Recommendation in Four Categories

Similar to other browsers in use today, we decided to enhance user loyalty by recommending content.  To that end, a new tab page was developed that included four parts: website navigation showing most recently visited websites, a video section, a music section, and a reading section.  It was our hope that users could find what they wanted to do and make selections within the browser itself.  In addition, users who did not want to be disturbed could choose to start on the second screen with no negative impact.

Challenges

• We needed to determine how to maintain a balance between consistency and content characteristics in each section.
• If all the positions required operations work after-the-fact, the Design team and the Operation team would be left with a significant workload every day.  Additionally, content with manual operation resulted in higher click rates versus machine generated ones.   We needed to determine how to optimize and balance these potential choices.
• Since there was a lot of variability in the quality of the pictures, we needed to determine how to maintain consistent high quality as we worked through changes each day.

Solution

• In order to maintain consistency, we decided to incorporate large tiles, a similar layout, and the same UI colors and fonts in all sections.
• Because of different requirements for each section, we established frequent communications with the Operation team. As an example, the video section banner pictures required manual operation; whereas, both banner and special topics needed the operation with music.
• Since there are delicate posters for movies and TV shows, fancy covers for albums, etc., we decided to use colors, for example, in the music section to distinguish the topics on the top four tiles.

Website navigation

Videos

Music

The Music section also included a link to a Radio station in the right corner. It played music from Xiami Music, one of the most popular music APP in China, by default. Users have the option to change to other personalized channels based on their interest. With the radio on and a CD in use, the music icon on the right side turns around synchronously.

Read

Weather icons

Accessed in the right corner of the first screen.

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V2.0

The goal of V2.0 is more business-oriented with more integration with Baidu search. The cards are visible, more concise and individualized.  Included are more promotion areas with increased recommendations for content coming from the search engine data.  Furthermore, the header was designed to interact directly with the search interface of Baidu.com with no changes in style in order to emphasize the relationship.

Based on an analysis of data from V1.0, we discovered that users preferred the reading sections over the others.  For this reason, the “Reading” card was placed ahead of all the others in V1.0.  Additionally, a “Joke” section was created by default to provide funny short stories for the users.  This was another trial resulting from recommendations of the reading sections.

Thinking

Content with different categories were organized with cards. The advertising banners could be viewed as a card as well. This allowed for each card to be independent, easily added, deleted or sorted. Users were also able to customize by putting the cards (the topics) that they were interested in on top.