How Baidu FEED Crafted a Year‑End Experience to Boost User Engagement

Background

At the end of each year, platforms launch billing‑review activities. Baidu APP’s homepage feed, as a content carrier, lacked a user‑facing review activity. In 2022 the team aimed to give Baidu APP users a sense of feed content and platform warmth by reviewing users’ reading behavior data and the platform’s high‑quality content, positioning FEED as an interesting and useful distribution platform.

Design Goals

Recent annual review designs from major companies have become standardized and homogeneous. The page flow is divided into three parts—start, review, and end—corresponding to three content structures that introduce scenarios, meet needs, and build cognition. The team seeks breakthroughs, strengthen brand, surprise users, and evoke memories.

Key Objectives

Strengthen brand perception by creating a dedicated brand IP throughout the activity.

Establish emotional connection through immersive scenarios that trigger user resonance.

Construct a dissemination chain with customized result pages and synchronized online‑offline promotion.

Design Strategy and Solutions

Perception: Build Brand IP

The design integrates youthful and brand‑centric concepts into a character image—young, energetic, wearing a scarf that cleverly incorporates the group’s logo. Initial sketches and visual guidelines ensure consistent style across designers, and the character is woven throughout the H5 experience to encourage sharing.

Review: Establish Emotional Connection

The activity creates an immersive atmosphere where users can temporarily escape worries, rediscover themselves, and relive memories. The concept “Baidu APP’s Soul Journey” invites users to meet, know, accompany, and share moments, using natural scenery, hand‑drawn and realistic visuals to convey warmth.

Warm‑up: Build Dissemination Chain

The ending page mirrors the middle page to ensure a smooth propagation path, retaining the natural illustration style while swapping content layers based on keywords. Six popular content verticals—finance, entertainment, food, sports, agriculture, society—receive distinct color schemes and keywords. Annual user data generate personalized keywords and character tags, supporting user sharing. Promotion spans online (feed, search, splash screens) and offline (large screens, electronic displays) to amplify impact.