BBC UX 2.0
| 15:00 PM, Friday, 28 March 2008
In my first month at the BBC we constructed what became known as the “wall of shame”: a collection of printed screen-shots of the BBC’s digital services which included web pages, mobile and Interactive TV.
Organised by portfolio, the wall soon became what could only be described as a collage of confusion, a display of conflicting designs and user journeys all of which depicted various epochs of innovation. More importantly, many of them weren’t even clearly branded as part of the BBC’s digital offering.
Additionally, the way that our audience would journey between these systems was and in many cases remains quite challenging and difficult. People can’t always find what they are looking for, couldn’t play media efficiently (almost 187 different media players were/are in use currently) nor could they share our content with others, discouraging our audience from being our biggest distributor.
In six short months we have taken major steps to solve some of these issues, creating a consistent navigation and look and feel now being deployed across the site, making the homepage useful & personalisable, creating a single embedded media player (EMP as we call it) with a single ingest and distribution infrastructure.
Notice the same EMP on both the Programme pages, News pages (soon with consistent standardized Share functionality) and the streaming iPlayer itself!
Lastly, but likely most significantly (and controversially) the new homepage - which was launched a few weeks ago, and announced by my creative director; Bronwyn Van der Merwe .
To those of you who say (like John Smales) “Why change it if it isn’t broken?” I'd make the following points:
First, if you haven’t taken a moment to do so, click the “customise my homepage” link. Over 68% of our users customised their homepage and you’ll be surprised how a few tweaks can really make it your own.
Secondly, there’s a tour and FAQ on the homepage which I recommend all of you take a few minutes to experience, a link to which you’ll find in the top right hand corner of the page. The majority of comments I’ve seen are already addressed either there or in previous blogs.
Thirdly, arguing about aesthetics is like singing about traffic. It’s not only ineffective, but it’s in large part not very pleasurable.
Lastly on the topic of measuring audience response:
Suffice to say that if we relied solely on blog comments on this page to do our market, audience, usability and accessibility research we would truly not be doing our jobs.
This blog is one of the variety of tools we can use to gauge response, but it is only one of them; and not really representative of the audience of BBC.co.uk.
The BBC has undertaken a variety of consumer research efforts around the changes we are making to it’s interactive offers, they have all come back remarkably positive. Change often instigates adverse reactions but what I’m quite keen to learn is the underlying audience demands and where we’re meeting them and where we can improve. Balancing these with the business and strategic goals of the BBC is one of the biggest challenges of my role.
Here's a selection of comments I want to respond to directly:
Brendan comments that “The new website has less information on the page”:
I’ve attached an overlay image here so you can see that there is far more information on this page now than there ever was before. Since it’s personalisable, you can have everything you ever wanted from the page, and eliminate much of what you didn’t!
More importantly, much more of this information is content, rather than blind links to various areas of the site you could have just as easily bookmarked, adding greater value & utility to the audience.
While it’s unlikely you would include every widget, maximised, we’ve made available a wide selection. 60% of you have chosen to personalise the site, we know we’ve satisfied a previously unmet audience demand.
“Screen size, page weight, etc.”:
As mentioned in a previous blog, our research shows us that the vast majority of our audience are coming to the site with 1024x768 resolution. Thus we decided to increase the screen real estate. In comparison with sites of similar stature or usage (Yahoo, MSN, CNN, Sky, LastFM, netvibes, etc.) we remain quite conservative and have one of the best performance ratios (size vs content) of any media company, content portal or news site.
There has always been a feature box on the home page, this hasn’t changed in five years.
We have expanded the image because we have expanded the page… while I think an interesting idea might be to allow customisable sizes for the feature (an idea we’re punting around as I write this) the idea of the promo is not new. I find it interesting so many focus on this issue, I’ll point you to James Price, and invite him to blog again about this area.
Many have discussed James' position to keep this as a fixed piece of content on the homepage.
I tend to agree with him. The reason you would choose the BBC homepage rather than pageflakes or netvibes would be because you felt that there was something inherently beneficial about our content and editorial choices.
Interesting user feedback we’ve taken on board:
“Web Search”:
The volume of feedback on this feature which did not make the transition from the old homepage frankly caught us by surprise. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft as well as browsers such as Firefox and Opera have a search bar built into their browsers. In our user testing and our own experience this feature felt outdated and unnecessary, given the superiority of the other products to the limited functionality of our offering.
However, on the strength of your feedback e.g comments like this one from Jane Skinner, I’ve asked the team to re-examine this feature (i.e. websearch) either as our first off BBC widget or to return it to the search bar. Keep a eye out for that.
“External widgets”
This is a hot topic amongst our team. One of the key challenges of the BBC homepage is that it must be compelling, useful and accessible to over 30m unique users. This is extremely hard to accomplish both from a design and a user experience perspective. There are also standards of quality for content and functionality.
Some of our users indicated they’d like to have a widget to check their gmail accounts for example, or incorporate content from other sites into the homepage. The editorial team is considering these options as we speak and I look forward to seeing this idea evolve if the demand is there. Please comment here if there are external widget feeds (flickr, gmail, search?) you’d like to see.
The new homepage has also raised the bar for accessibility; setting new standards which I hope will become the new benchmark across BBC digital services.
Making our content & services available to as large as an audience as possible is an area of professional and personal passion of mine. Jonathan from my team has blogged on this topic and we have received kudos from the audience as well.
It’s been just over ½ a year since I joined the BBC, the energy here and collaborative environment, particularly here in User Experience & Design, are amazing.
None of products or services I’ve mentioned is a “ship and forget”. All of them are constantly iterating parts of our digital service, evolving to meet requirements, needs and goals of both the audience & the BBC.
As my colleagues here and in the blogosphere say, “still more to come!”
Richard Titus is Controller, User Experience and Design, BBC Future Media & Technology.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~22~RS~)
Comments
I would say the new website is far better than its previous incarnation. There is undoubtedly plenty of room of improvements and new feeds, all of which will take time to gauge audience response and to maintain consistency. To that end, I don't think you should feel too bothered by the calls to 'keep things the same'; that's the natural reaction for many. We do generally dislike change.
Having said that, I would really welcome more embedded video content, as well as more colour choices (some seem to have been discarded in the move from beta to final release). The single criticism I would make is the apparent denial that we as users know what's best for us when it comes to the BBC's advertising; The feature box is in my view both annoying and unnecessary. I do accept that some people - perhaps most people - like it however, so I would just ask (again) why it would be so hard to let the few who don't like it do away with it?
Real content of my choosing would always trump that which is pushed to me unsolicited. Today is as good an example as any: I have gone digital, I don't watch Doctor Who, I would never watch cycling on TV and although I like REM, I'm perfectly able to make I own music choices thank you very much.
Would an 'hide' button be too much to ask for?
I wonder too if the comments system is working alright? I tried an awful lot of times to submit the above comment, all the time receiving an error message.
Rather than putting down feedback comments on blogs I recommend a more humble approach.
Why do you think blog feedback is not representative of the audience of BBC.co.uk?
Is this post representative of the audience of bbc.co.uk?
Apart from anything, I'm impressed with the level of transparency during the whole process of redesigning and implementing the upgrades to the site.
It's a great body of work for other sites/publishers working towards similar goals.
Yor new website and connection must have been set up by the same firm that completed the work at terminal 5
Less than useless!
I don't have a problem with a fixed feature box - you need somewhere which everyone can see - I just think that it is not used to its full potential right now. For example, yesterday there was an advert for the new series of Doctor Who - with a link to watching the trailer online. Why not use your "embedded media player" to put that trailer in the feature box on the homepage - that way I'm much more likely to watch. Missed the Apprentice? Watch it directly in the homepage using the BBC iPlayer. Problems at Heathrow's Terminal 5 - watch a news report direct from the feature box... etc.
My only designer-type gripe, is that with the new consistent masthead/footer that you are rolling out across the site, there seems to be indecision over font-usage.
Whilst Verdana is utilised on the home page (which is not a great font for the large headings), Arial is used elsewhere on the site. I've documented the difference here. A minor irritation, but an important one I feel.
I'm also not sure why the BBC seems to be increasingly moving away from it's use of Gill Sans. I know it's quite a dated font compared to 1997 when the new corporate identity was introduced, but some lighter weights still look really nice. The point I'm getting at here is, that it would be nice to see more intelligent font targeting in the CSS, listing Gill Sans type fonts for the masthead/footer areas, and perhaps the headings on the homepage.
Verdana is a very un-BBC like font choice, and in my opinion, cheapens the brand.
The thing about screen width is that you assume everyone wants to use the maximum that they bring to the table. My screen width is 1920 pixels, and I certainly don't want to use all that to see a web page. Or even 1024 pixels. We use windowed systems so we can view more than one window at the same time.
More generally, this entire blog entry seems to say "well we've listened to you, but we know better so were not changing anything."
"Thirdly, arguing about aesthetics is like singing about traffic. It’s not only ineffective, but it’s in large part not very pleasurable. "
--Your arrogance and ignorance is astounding!
"Suffice to say that if we relied solely on blog comments on this page to do our market, audience, usability and accessibility research we would truly not be doing our jobs."
--Quite. When you launched the beta, this blog was flooded with mostly positive comments from the techy-types who like to persue betas and read blogs.
When the page launched "for real", with a link here, suddenly ordinary users were leaving feedback. And guess what? Your rushed, unresearched and under-resourced (c.f. The Glass Wall) project was roundly criticised.
Now the usual BBC arrogance shines though (look at any response to any complaint).
Whenever a service provider with a massive user base changes ANYTHING - there is always a response. This feedback comes universally, from the most 'vocal' or passionate users.
You only need to see the quality and passion of the comments above to see just what I mean; informed people with a commitment to helping you improve the website.
However, as the owner of a successful marketing business, I know that the opinions of the most vocal users are not always an accurate reflection of what the wider user base think.
Fortunately, statistics software allows website owners to accurately measure what the wider user base think of our changes. For example, it will show us things like; how many new visitors we get, how long they stay on the site and how many pages they view etc.
When I changed the format for http://www.jimconnolly.com we had a lot of feedback from people who hated the new design – yet numbers across the board almost tripled!
I guess the question here is: “What are the numbers telling you?”
Don't worry about widgets, just get everything working for OpenSocialAPI.
Unless the BBC is going to implement it's own social networking items on bbc.co.uk, if you want people to co-operate with the content, get OpenSocialing please. Then we can can share, forward and so forth from whatever social networking system we use, be it Facebook or something else.
A lovely, refreshing and modern look and feel to the BBC News website. The 'expanded' format doesn't allow for any additional columns, pictures or text than the previous version - this is a shame but the new site is much easier on the eyes.
I'm looking forward to seeing how the page will look when the next major story breaks and the BBC News does an a 'feature' on the story on the home page as has happened in the past.
Very well done and I hope it won't take another 2 years for the BBC News website to change again. Continuous evolvement is good. :)
People can complain all they like about the new homepage: at the end of the day, the BBC now has a homepage that looks - and is interactive - like a 2008 website, not a 1998 one. Well done.
My only bad feeling, though, is the widgets idea. There are enough "personalised homepage" sites available. Stick to news, because that's what you do well.
Bloated with white space. Looks like worn a ladybird book (with the grey text and big spacing) Mind you, there's also acres of whiet space in the source code.
I HATE SCROLLING, so why not make use of an auto-expanding width?
If 1024 is now commonplace, why is this the MINIMUM size to render in? My browser shares space on the desktop with other applications. The size should have be taken from what size windows people use and not the resolution of their display.
'REAL WORLD' testing would have avoided this embarassing waste of an opportunity.
I hope that those responsible will accept the criticism from their customers and get it fixed.
I hope that their appraisals are judged on the customer feedback!
:-(