BBC
Lead UX Designer
2010-2011
Responsible for:
- Live coverage
- Homepage
- Story pages
- Live results
Activities:
- Ran workshops
- Developed concepts, scamps, wireframes to final designs
We also needed to harness the lessons we learnt from the publishing experiments trailed on the earlier Vancouver Winter Olympics and World Cup to support our journalists cover a multitude of live sports and punditry with the help of social media and 3rd party feeds and keep this timely and easy to discover. Essentially BBC started to evolve from a relational and static content publishing model within their CMS to a dynamic semantic publishing. This allowed the ability to automate the process to utilise feeds and aggregate relevant stories from many sources using an ontology that helped stitch it altogether.
What we inherited
BBC Sport was a popular website with 3 million visitors a day and an average of 11.5 million a week. The redesign needed to bring the current audience as it improved the website for new visitors and moved towards the ability to showcase more live coverage.
The challenge
Currently this breadth and depth of coverage isn’t perceived or understood by audiences. We needed to improve this perception and aid discovery with clarity and relevance.
There are nearly 200 journalists. Creating 50-200 stories, podcasts and video packages a day. They have all sorts of stories to tell. There was also an editorial strategy to on-board new household sporting heroes as commenters, which needed more prominence. They have results and live scores for hundreds and hundreds of sporting events. Sport also covers lots of events with live with video, text commentary, audio commentary, stats and standings.
Customer insights
We had a mix of audiences which were consolidated into personas using past research outputs and interviews. They were broken down into five types
- Banter – we needed to give them have great facts and analysis as part of their social currency
- General sports fan – this member had a broad appreciation of sports and thrived on news and results
- Intelligent comment – this member values the backstory, the build-up and post-match analysis as well as the event itself
- Main eventer – this member engages in those big sporting events that brings nations together (Wimbledon, Olympics etc.)
- Sports obsessive – these are power users, they don’t like to miss out on anything and thrive on live data and news.
Personas
Rhythm of the week
Experience strategy and vision
To help us make decisions on our scamps we created a set of design principles and content strategy. This also helped to evangelise our concepts, gain alignment and drive decision making with our stakeholders. These were derived from the customer research and overall business strategy.
Developing the concept
Using the personas and their challenges we created some task flows and using these we created two levels of scamps – The first scamp exercise was a “sketch storm” these focused on how we could possibly address certain behavioural needs. The second scamp took some of the more intriguing and interesting ideas and we started to create interface flows.
Early ideas – syndicated BBC Sport deck
Early ideas – Live ticker
Early ideas – Onward journeys
Anatomy of a live event – concept model
Anatomy of a live event – pre-event/ live / post event analysis
Anatomy of a live event – high fidelity designs
The service and validation
As we progressed with our concepts we mocked up a few screens to validate with some target customers. Our core customer base were the football fans, which we recruited mainly from but we also included the other profiles as we needed them to feel that our product will serve their needs.
We had a few rounds of tests, iterating our ideas one each round
What I learnt
As this redesign was a revolution as opposed to an evolution, it would have been beneficial to launch some kind of beta to help introduce the new designs and the new benefits which came with it before switching of the old one. Although in the tests we had actually improved the way we were able to make content more discoverable, which was received very positively during the tests. A different picture emerged when the site went live, people had gotten used to the way things were. At first, some of the comments came back negative, but over the course of the following weeks they soon turned very positive.
However, one issue really lingered. As we were developing the website, we introduced the Sport Yellow into the designs which received negative comments. We couldn’t change this as it was the brand colour of BBC Sport which was used more effectively on the television as it was animated and the shock of the yellow didn’t dominate as it had done on our static pages. This reaction was echoed with overwhelming negative responses from the audience on launch, but as time evolved this did calm down.
I actually left the project before launch, but I still had a close relationship with the team, launching was only the beginning of the learning phase. More was iterated post launch as the team were able to analyse usage logs and conduct post launch usability tests. The yellow issue subsided and now is part of the identity.
Project currently live – www.bbc.co.uk/sport – example of Football index page and story page (before the yellow masthead)
