blog
Jem Stone
And the winner is
FF Ecosystem and BBC Malkovich
What we liked:
- The way that Andy (and his colleagues ?) have cracked how to reflect content, conversations and data taking place away from bbc.co.uk
- That nod to Being John Malkovich - seeing "our" content through someone else's eyes, that letting go, neatly articulates some of the new challenges for a BBC2.0
- How it also has several answers to the query posed to us by Jeff Jarvis after a recent visit; "shouldn’t your role be to guide viewers/listeners/readers/users/us to the best information and programmes you can help us find"
- As with several of the runners up, this was a design you wanted to have. now. (even if, on reflection, some of our more practically minded colleagues expressed a few concerns!.)
- This is a simple page/front end for a hideously complex amount of data.
- Actually it was the BBC - You - Everybody else slider that swung it. A brilliant idea for a widget.
- And mentioning the tears that had gone into producing the concept.
My boss is a Spurs fan. A devoted Spurs fan. Clearly MattB (the sample user) is a gooner . Don't say we aren't going out on a limb in plumping for this one.
Actually this was really tough. Apologies to everyone who has put aside many hours submitting entries. I think you're supposed to say "You're all winners" at this point. Unfortunately you're not. Just FF Ecosystem are but full respect to everyone who committed hours and effort as part of this competition.
We will be contacting Andy(and his colleagues) today and hopefully getting him into the BBC soonish to hand over his prize.
Full list of the runners up.
Jem Stone
This was tough. And before i start ...another, probably unfair generalisation about the quality and range of entries. We found ourselves liking individual elements and components of pages rather than the entire package. So if the comments below seem a bit picky or that we've picked runners up on the strength of one idea rather than the execution of the homepage then that's, er, because we have.
So the runners up in no particular order are:
1.Cintrao - BBC Homepage
Things we liked: The integration of widgets, the contextual help (step by step guide to ...), the control of the user over the layout and the boxes.
2.Paul - BBC Active
Things we liked Paul did something that several users did (but we didn't insist on) which was to articulate his vision and thoughts on the competition in extensive detail back on his site. This was a particularly rich example of that. What impressed us also was the smart usage (tucked away in the top rh corner) of a minimised media/radio player and his thoughts (that Martin Belam also cited in one of his reviews) on how to customise that "Radio 1 in the morning, Five live in the afternoon".
Read his notes and you'll also find some musings on Charles Clarke's head.
3.James Willock - BBC Cool Blues
James Willock
Things we liked:
This was an example where the commenters were aligned with the judges..
Tim Dennell said:
" I really like:
Use of lenses to reveal more info.
Use of vector graphics for weather symbols.
To make the customisation button more obvious I’d prefer it to ‘flash’ gently or even flash and say ‘click me’.
Overall a nice personalisation page."
I never say the word nice, though, if I can help it.
4.BBC:refresh - Frankie Roberto
Things we liked:
Here again we've been a bit paradoxical in the sense that we've shortlisted this site although overall there were other designs that we valued more. What swung it was incredible documentation. Frankie really does show us "his working out".
5.BBC 2.0 - Netrix
Things we liked:
Netrix rethought the page almost entirely around the concept of playing out video and audio and sees the homepage entirely as an a/v content guide/EPG.
6.Calvin - BBC Web 2.0ed out
Things we liked:
We envisaged more entries like Calvins. This does border on a web2.0 parody (well we did mention Web2.0 in the brief again and again). Ajax: tick, Tag clouds: tick, RSS: tick yep they're all there. Even the mocked up promo was about Web2.0, that said it handles the representation of personal data across the internet (and the BBC) really well.Yet again there is an Incredible level of documentation, varied mock ups/user journeys and some novel ideas (tag link bubble anyone ?).
7..Croops - BBC Reinvented
Things we liked: This looked real. I wanted to use this.
8. I don't want a portal, I want an information workspace - ukavu -
Things we liked: The title. Although you had me at "I don't want a portal". The only person to include personalised Major League Baseball scores.
9. Jim Schumacher, Sean Schumacher - future is delicious
Things we liked: I liked the nod to the fonts of the Apple homepage (can you spot ?). This is another extensive rethink of entry points for the BBC in far more depth than we envisaged receiving. Worth noting just for the "at a glance" dashboard.
10. Triple John - BBC feeds
Things we liked: It was the 2 fascinating "social media" ideas here that swung it. The promos for Project: Planet Earth ("six billion volunteers required"). Eat that myspace! And the idea of a collaborative wiki based EastEnders script also stood out. This pushed things a bit. This felt like it might happen.
We will (from tomorrow morning) be in touch with all of the above to arrange your prizes and addresses.
So what about the winner. They're picked and waiting but ... I'm afraid we'll be leaving that til...tomorrow.
Jem Stone
Before (sorry for the suspense) I get on to announcing the winners for the competition. A few thoughts.
1.Thanks
We were bowled over by the # of entries for the competition. In the end we received 138 designs, prototypes and mock ups. In retrospect we probably didn't give you enough time to enter and then, in the end, dithered over announcing the winners (in fact we still are) so so a very British cheers and all that and thanks for sticking with us.
2.The Judging
The entries have been judged by myself; Jem Stone (I'm an executive producer at bbc.co.uk ) and Tom Loosemore who is bbc.co.uk's Head of Strategic Innovation and is leading a project to radically overhaul the BBC website. We also had input from Martin Belam who was a guest poster to the reboot blog whilst we were running the competition, and thanks to the hundreds of comments and blog posts about the competition. In doing the shortlisting we had a big steer from the entrants to the competition and the users of the site.
Also as part of Tom's project a selection of the designs were also evaluated by on a bbc.co.uk away day (and no they didn't play croquet) by the heads of dept for the various BBC web teams.
3.Criteria
We were looking at a number of criteria. Surprisingly, despite our pleadings there were v.few that did, in the end take it in Ben's phrase "all the way back to the drawing board". Bucking the trend were these three entries (from the same team ?) all received at the same time; Matthia's; BBC icecubed, Benno's Complete Shuffle Box, and Carina's BBC Shuffle combination box that had a real poke at navigation metaphors but that was about it. The overwhelming pattern was boxes and tables and panels and lists.
The other key criteria was exploring greater relevance and if i must say it then that (horrible) word; personalisation. Inspired by a number of speeches and interviews with Ashley Highfield before the competition started where he talked about coming up with a "a personalised BBC homepage that will provide people with a starting place for their journey through the BBC's content and beyond.", many of the entries focused on the concept of share. Several were actually called mybbc.
Finally with the impending launch of the BBC's iPlayer we were looking for (and got) all manner of attempts to crack how to showcase and highlight video content.
4.Special thanks for trying to subert the whole thing
You didn't win but we had good fun with Chris Hammond's streamlined portal, Matt Sephton's Ceefax tribute and we had a soft spot for NIrelan's empty screen; "I am sending you a blank page becuase this contest proves that what you need to do is give the content away in a format that everyone can use to design thier own version of the site.". Perhaps one day (he says wistfully) the rather complex and vast BBC site will be structured in such a way that we really will be able to do a CSS reboot competition.
5.We had no idea that Slashdot would run a reboot competition at exactly the same time offering the same prize(s). It was a genuine coincidence. Honest.
6.Finally: We want to reboot, not rip-off. Just to echo Ben's post from back in early May. This has been a valuable process for us as we go through the process of rethinking bbc.co.uk. It was part of a number of inputs. As Tom said in a note explaining how we used the entries "internally" - "It helped freshen up our thinking and stop us from getting too parochial. It's proved very helpful to have the 'voice of the user' in the room, albeit manifested as A3 printouts of entries covering the walls. "
Reboot Team
We'll be announcing the winners and runner-ups for Reboot (finally) by close of play: Wednesday July 5th. Apologies for the delay.
Thanks again for everyone's interest and emails wondering where we'd gone (watching the World Cup mostly).
In the meantime. Martin Belam who contributed a 16 (count em') part guide to designing and building a bbc.co.uk homepage as part of the blog for the competition has been surveying the entries (over 5 parts..natch) on his personal blog; Currybet.
Reviewing the reboot: bbc.co.uk entries: Part One | Two | Three | Four | Five
There are also further blog coverage of the competition on my del.icio.us reboot tag.
See you on Wednesday.
Ben Metcalfe
Thank you to everyone who entered the Reboot:bbc.co.uk competition.
The response has been fantastic - so fantastic in fact that we are still in the process of reviewing the entries and adding them to the website. If you don't see your entry up yet, please be patient as we're slowly working through all of the entries in our inbox!
A panel of judges, yet to be decided, will convene to sift through the entries and award prizes to the best designs.
We'll let you know the outcome here first!
Finally, can I take this opportunity to once again personally thank everyone who spent time designing and building an entry.
Ben
Martin Belam
I've been putting together my own "entry" for the reboot:bbc.co.uk competition, and as I do so I've been going through how a project like this might develop within the BBC - and now with the competition closing today, I'm also at the final stage.
Once the new page was in the process of being built using the Scrum process I discussed yesterday, I'd expect to user test it again. Now that bits of it are working I would be looking to re-test the assumptions that were made earlier based on the previous testing.
You do have to be careful with this kind of late stage user-testing however, to make sure you put the correct amount of store by the findings. As I think I've mentioned before - when we did user testing on the BBC's search results interface back in 2002, we ended up finding out that something like only a third of people understood how to use the tabs. But we also found that only a third of people understood how to use radio buttons if we designed a page using them. And we knew that only a third of people understood how to use drop-down menus to 'scope' their searches. Which left us pretty much none-the-wiser as to how to improve the interface for everybody. The project ended up trapped in a cycle of producing design iterations that nobody was confident enough to use.
Likewise I've worked on a project where very near the end of the build user testing showed that production staff found the error messages "confusing". In the end I had to make a judgement call that it was a complicated application, and editorial staff were just going to have to get to grips with it - we didn't have time to build a whole new error handling module into the system.
After each scrum cycle has finished, I'd also expect to see QA work done on a project as big as redesigning the BBC homepage. I'd want to see end-to-end testing of the publication chain that made sure the News and Sports headlines were on the page, and I'd want to get some figures about the page footprint (i.e. how much each indivudal browser has to download to display the page) and expected bandwidth consumption to assist in optimising the design. I'd also want the page checked across a whole series of different browsers on PCs, Macs and LINUX machines, to make sure it worked well across all of them on the BBC's supported browser list. That also means checking that the page works for users who have cookie support or JavaScript switched off.
The BBC doesn't (well, didn't) have a dedicated testing team in-house. This work is usually carried out by producers, and then for very technical system testing, the BBC will hire in specialists on a contract basis. The BBC also uses a little volunteer group of testers, usually associated with the DNA powered sites like h2g2 or the message board system on bbc.co.uk - these can be potentially set loose on any new project to give an often very honest appraisal of it. Sometimes a little too honest perhaps for the liking of some BBC producers ;-)
Finally, it would be time for the project manager to concentrate on their most important task - organising a suitably riotous launch party. As a general rule of thumb it is best not to party on the actual night of launch. For one thing, people are liable to be very tired and possibly quite worked up having rushed to meet deadlines, and may not be in the best of moods to enjoy a good party. Secondly, you should always give a new system time to bed down before celebrating. Otherwise, there is a risk that something could go wrong just after launch, and there is no more thankless task than trying to drag software engineers away from a party in order to get broken things fixed at short notice...
Well, I've finished my theoretical entry to the competition - and it looks something like this.
It isn't a finished visual design, more of a coloured-in wireframe, but it pretty much lays out all the content and functionality I'd expect to see on the page.
Anyway I hope that my series of posts has been useful in giving a glimpse behind the scenes of how the BBC's New Media department builds products and services - well, at least how it did before I left the BBC six months ago anyway - and also has given an insight into how many requirements have to be balanced by the current design of BBC homepage.
I see there has been a flurry of new entries published in the gallery over the last couple of days. If you have entered the competition, which, as I say, closes today, then I wish you the best of luck when the judging starts.
Ben Metcalfe
Hey all, just a quick heads-up to remind you that the closing date for the competition is May 25th – that's this Thursday!
We'll accept entries until the end of the day, but if I were you I'd start getting 'em in now! (we know that some of you are being very sneaky and sitting on them until the end! Grr!)
If you need some last-minute inspiration, check out a few of these links:
Best of luck,
Ben
Martin Belam
Once projects go into the technical build phase within the BBC's New Media department, they often follow a development management process known as Scrum.
Essentially it is a process where producers and designers specify a list of what they want software to do in descending order of priority. They then leave the programmers alone to get on with for the length of a scrum cycle. At the end of the cycle the programmers present back what they have developed, which should always be working software. It may not have all of the features yet, but it should be good enough to work. During the development phase this process will be reiterated until the product is ready to launch. At the beginning of each cycle the producers can re-prioritise what is important, remove features or add new features.
As a system of working it should bring two key benefits. Producers get a new version of the software or a system which works at the end of each month, so they can do testing, and show it to people. Programmers get a defined set of requirements to work on which do not change for a given period of time.
Of course, when I say that the producers and designers leave the programmers alone, I don't mean that they are locked in a box incommunicado. A key part of the Scrum process is an update meeting that takes place everyday. Each programmer will state what they worked on yesterday, what they are going to be working on today, and report any problems that are holding them up. The aim is for this meeting to take as little time as possible - project managers, designers and producers are welcome to attend, but forbidden to speak. After the meeting would generally then be the time for the technical lead on the project and the producer to discuss together any concerns they might have. Essentially Scrum should allow programmers to get along with what they do best - programming - whilst forcing producers and designers to focus on making sure their contribution meets the deadline of being ready for the next time they have access to request work.
Of course, my hypothetical reboot:bbc.co.uk entry doesn't have a technical team building it using Scrum, it is just me and my trusty copy of Photoshop ;-)
Martin Belam
BBC Today isn't the right title for it - but this is the area of the page where I would display the user's local weather, their local traffic news, and some topical editorial content.
I wouldn't change much about the current weather display on the homepage, except to remove the map - as various people have pointed out in comments on this blog, it is actually the weather icons that are of interest to the user, not that Sheffield is still vaguely in the same place in the UK. I did very much like the idea in the entry ---stream--- of a user's weather photo going into the space the map currently occupies.
For travel alerts the user would need to supply some kind of location information, and perhaps some information on the mode of transport that interests them. I don't have a car for example, so I'm only interested in news about the roads if it is going to impact on the local buses. When I lived in London I used to commute using the Central Line and the Victoria Line, so I'd want to know if they were up the spout.
Thinking of partnership opportunites, again there is a chance here for the BBC to collaborate with other providers of this type of information - I apologise for being London-centric, but perhaps the BBC could incorporate data supplied directly from the TfL site for example. In any case, I'd imagine the travel news section to be displayed as a ticker - you'd hope that most of the time it would say "No reported problems", but when there was lots of travel information you'd want it all.
Finally I would include some editorial content. I don't think it is the most important thing on the page, but it does give the page a feel of being current - as I've mentioned before, at Christmas I expect to see something Christmas-y there and so forth. My page doesn't have much that conveys topical relevence to what is going on around the UK outside of what is making the news headlines. Although I don't think my ex-colleagues on the homepage will thank me for the even more restricted character count I've given them in the space!
Martin Belam
Probably the most challenging bit of my design for the BBC technically and editorially is my proposal that the page feature "My Inbox" - access to the users regular web-based mail service straight from the BBC homepage. It has also already prompted a couple of sceptical comments elsewhere on this blog.
The key to making this a success is whether it is easy to sign up to, and whether users would trust the BBC with their details. I think with the number of people already registered with the BBC, and the general trust in the brand in the UK that would not be too much of a problem. Technically it might be a challenge, and certainly usability wise it would be a challenge.
The technology is already there - you only have to look at Firefox extensions like the Gmail notifier to see that it can be done. My idea is that the BBC would partner with existing webmail providers like Gmail and Hotmail and AOL and Yahoo! Mail to make the technical details smoother. Users would select their mail provider, enter their sign on credentials to the BBC site, and then their most recent messages would be displayed on the page.
The thinking behind it? Email is the most prevelant activity on the internet - and it is the one major internet activity that the BBC is not involved with. By partnering with existing commercial providers, rather than trying to replicate their services, the BBC could bring email into the fold of their online offering, and offer a homepage that was a really complete starting point to explore the web.
Martin Belam
The My Conversations panel of my redesigned page is where the homepage aggregates all of a users contributions to the BBC site. As Jem mentioned in one of the really early posts on this blog, registration and membership of the BBC site is increasing rapidly, and stands at around 3m. A lot of these are people who participate in the BBC's user generated content services like message boards, or have particpated in sites like the now sadly closed The People's War - and this is a way of reflecting back their contributions onto the homepage so they can easily see if there have been new replies to their messages.
Like my 'My Bookmarks' panel, this panel would exhibit three levels of complexity in behaviour.
If you are a user who doesn't take part in any BBC message boards, it would should a rotating teaser of conversations you could join in, rather like the one embedded in the CBBC homepage.
If you use any of the BBC's conversational softwares, then your latest contributions would be displayed here - and I would expect it to work acrors both the DNA powered message boards, and the BBC News Have Your Say boards which bewilderingly use different technology.
The highest level of complexitiy would be an ambition to aggregate a users conversation from all over the web - something like coComment is aiming to do. I'm not 100% how this would be achieved technically - probably a combination of the user clicking a bookmarklet, or building some frightningly complicated API ping framework that blog software and message board software could send to the BBC. But that's probably just me drifting away from design and into technical details again ;-)
I think one thing that I have noticed from the entries in the competition so far is that there seems to be a lot of designs which involves delivering personalised content back to the user once they have chosen it - i.e. my local news, my favourite programmes. Very few seem to be proposing to do transactional personalisation by just tracking actual user behaviour - i.e. here are the pages you visited, the conversations you've had, the competitions you've entered, the votes you've made, the email newsletters you have subscribed to, the video clips that you have watched etc. These kind of features seem to me to have a much lower barrier to entry for people who are not used to personalising their web experience.
Martin Belam
The idea behind my 'My Bookmarks' panel on my redesign of the BBC homepage, is actually a very old one, and one that has been knocking around inside the BBC for years. Variations on it have already been trialled with some user groups. The fundamental point for my himepage design is that there are lots of users who only visit the same several places on the site - so why not let them have the links they need on the homepage to make the journey easier?
However, it might be quite tricky for novice users to get the hang of, so my idea is that this part of the page works on three levels.
The first level is that rather like what 'collective' does in the foot of the pages there, where the site tracks which pages a user has visited. These would then be displayed back to the user when they next visit my reboot:bbc.co.uk homepage in the 'Recent pages' section. This can probably be done with session cookies, and wouldn't even require registration, thus providing some kind of personalised navigation and footprint for users who didn't want to bother with fiddling with personalised features.
The second level is to allow users to 'bookmark' pages on bbc.co.uk. I would propose adding a 'Bookmark this' link either into the toolbar or standard navigation across the BBC site, and when it was clicked it would populate this panel. For more advanced users the BBC could also offer a bookmarklet or Firefox extension and the like to allow them to bookmark pages across the whole of the web. I wouldn't suggest that the BBC build this architecture from scratch - maybe it should consider partnering with Furl or del.icio.us or some other social bookmarking technology.
The third level is for advanced users, who already use a service like Furl or del.icio.us - the BBC should give the option of plugging the URL of a pre-exisiting bookmarking service's RSS feed into the panel - so that the user can continue to use their favourite service, but also get the results displayed back to them when they visit bbc.co.uk.
The concept isn't disimilar to some of the ideas in one of my favourite entries into the competition so far - rudpunk's Home and BBC Box. What I particularly liked was the concept and mock-up of the "BBC Box", where users could save their favourite BBC content and searches, and links from the web, into different folder topics. It looked like a really good idea, and I was impressed with the finer detail in the mock-up, like providing links to a BBC box button for IE and Firefox.
Martin Belam
As I'm writing for this competition I can't enter it myself - but I'm just running through some of the features I would include if I were submitting an entry.
On my reboot:bbc.co.uk page, I've replaced the whole of the directory section that is on the current BBC homepage, with one long line of letters and numbers, which will lead through to the BBC's comprehensive A-Z index.
Now, the BBC homepage used to have a section like this back in 2002, but it was removed when the page was last re-designed in 2004.
I have to say of all the design decision made on the page during my time at the BBC, there were two things I intensely disliked about the 2004 re-design.
The first was the logo. It seemed entirely designed to work well on television and to sit nicely alongside the BBC's current square logos for BBC One, BBC Two etc. In fact, on the TV advertising campaign, the BBC.co.uk logo background pulsed - and I'm sure that was what was originally intended for the web. Yet the graphic is almost exactly the wrong shape for use as a logo on the web, where it ended up spending most of the time - and it forces that large amount of mostly wasted banner space at the top of the current homepage design.
The second was the decision to drop the links through to the individual A-Z Index pages. I never saw the work behind it - but, essentially on a hunch, I just can't agree with it. Putting the A-Z links up front on the homepage must surely cut down the time people waste navigating through the site - I want EastEnders, I click 'E'. I want football I click 'F', or more specifically I can click 'L' for Leeds United. I want to find out about the solar system, I click 'S' for science, or space, or solar system, or The Sky At Night. Or 'P' for planets. Or 'M' for "Mars, Exploring".
A lot of work was put in by a team a talented information architects at the BBC to revamp the classification of content within the A-Z last year, and one of them, Helen Lippell, wrote an excellent article about the work, which is well worth reading - The ABCs of the BBC.
Martin Belam
The search element of my reboot:bbc.co.uk design is going to be big and prominent. We know from research that some web-users are just search dominant, and will always try and use search rather than navigate, and we also know that with literally millions of pages of BBC content and more being added every day that a navigation only approach isn't going to work.
Last week the BBC re-launched its search service. I've been impressed with most of what I've seen so far - the redesign has fixed some real problems with the old search interface. On the other hand, IMHO, it has inevitably fixed some things that weren't broken.
I think to really get on demand at the heart of the search there are still a few tweaks required - although I'm not sure the technology is quite up to it yet.
I'd still want to bring results back from several different datasets, but I'd want to do it more intelligently and dynamically. If a user has searched for a programme title, and it is available on demand via the new iPlayer, then I want that link right up front. I still want news to be treated differently - indexed faster and ranked by date rather than strict relevance - but I want it included subtly like Google, Yahoo! and the new BBC Search do, rather than disguising it in the regular run of results like the old BBC Search did.
I also want BBC and world wide web links integrated into the same results set, but I want the number of results displayed from each to be dynamically intelligent - judge how many results you get back from the BBC and the web to work out how "BBC" a query is, and return more bbc.co.uk links the more "BBC" the query is.
Still, redesigning the just-redesigned BBC search service is perhaps another competition for another day ;-)
Back to my proposed homepage redesign, I'd also retain the current feature that shows some recent popular searches from across the site. Why? Well, partly from selfish nostalgia - I helped in the work to put them there in 2002 in the first place, and don't want to see them removed!
More rationally however, looking at all the elements on the page, once you've made a lot of things personalised, you've broken the "collective experience". Currently when you go to the BBC homepage on February 14th - you know it is Valentine's Day. Likewise, in the run-up to Christmas, the page often has a Christmassy feel. Well, there isn't very much on my redesigned page to achieve the effect of reflecting what is going on in the world that might not be news, but would perhaps be a seasonal ambience. Displaying popular searches is a way of doing that - as they always reflect what the public are currently interested in the UK. It injects a bit automated personality and topicality into the page.
Martin Belam
The BBC recently announced that what was known as the myBBCplayer has become the iPlayer. I don't know what it is about 'i' at the moment, but there seems to be the same sort of rash of them just as when everybody started doing e-Commerce and e-Banking and e-Government back in the late nineties. Perhaps the vowel moves along the alphabet every few years, and by 2010 we'll be talking about o-Services and o-Gadgets?
Anyway, I don't know what form the iPlayer is going to take - whether it will be web-based pop-up like the BBC's current Radio Player, or some downloadable software like the iMP trial was - but whatever it is I want a great big chunk of it embedded into my homepage design. I think the BBC will be really missing a trick if it ends up advertising "Get what you want, when you want, where you want - go to double-yew double-yew double-yew dot bee bee cee dot co dot you-kay slash interactive teevee player gizmo thing" rather than having it slap bang in the middle of the homepage, and being able to advertise "Get what you want, when you want, where you want - go to bee bee cee dot co dot you-kay". I really think if the BBC is serious about putting on demand at the heart of its services, it needs to put it at the heart of the homepage.
So what is the player going to do on my redesigned page? Well, I think like a TV you are going to be able to skip across the channels, and I think from each channel you should be able to watch the current live stream, or choose to watch catch-up TV. And I think Radio should be in the mix as well. Back in the UK I used to quite happily record things off Radio 4 onto my TiVo via Digital Satellite, and I think on demand really removes one of the distinctions between radio and TV - that you use different devices.
So my idea is basically a screen with some moving stuff, some tabs at the top to change channels, which will be BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, CBBC, CBeebies, News 24 plus two "non-channel" brands - BBC Sport and BBC Weather, plus a BBC Radio tab. Then next to the screen will be a contextual menu for each channel. So, not entirely a huge leap from the BBC's existing broadband pop-up streaming consoles it must be said - although having a moving image slap bang in the middle of the homepage is a bit of a leap - not least in terms of the volume of bandwidth the page will take to serve.
The next question I have is what should the video box be playing when you first load the page? If anything?
I really like UEFA.com's homepage design - but I always think my computer is about to self-destruct when I visit it, because low down on the page it has embedded video which automatically starts with some countdown pips. The BBC Two broadband site is another place with embedded video on the page.
If I was at the BBC, I'd want to get some more research done specifically around this. Does embedded video annoy people? How prominent should the mute button be? Should the video in fact start silent and then offer the user the chance to add sound?
And actually, the more I've thought about it, that is a lot of tabs, and some users will never watch "BBC Four", or have no need for the "CBBC" or "CBeebies" tabs. So perhaps the tabs should be customisable. And I was also thinking, maybe having the ability to add tabs like "BBC Food" and "BBC DIY" would be useful for a lot of users. And I'd need "BBC Sci-Fi" of course. So perhaps there should be a palette of tabs that the user can choose from and have on their version of the embedded iPlayer?
Well, I'm not going to solve those questions myself - so I think for now I'll just specify "some video content with some tabs above it" - it might be BBC One streaming, it might be a specifically put together promo for programmes that day/that week, it might just be a silent generic BBC ident. The tabs might be channels, genres or individual programme brands. Someone else can figure that all out at a later date...
...and that is another important lesson about product development - know your own limits, and know when other people are best-placed to make decisions ;-)
Martin Belam
Yesterday I was posting about how I would like to combine headlines from several different feeds onto the BBC homepage, but there are times when one story becomes so big that it ends up dominating the whole page.
September 11th 2001 was one occasion like this - when the three promotional panels on the old BBC Online design of homepage were given over to hastily copied and published BBC News despatches about the events in the USA. The BBC's servers were facing so much traffic that at times internally it was difficult to get connected in order to update the content.
The end of the school siege in Beslan was another such example, when the usual promo space on the page was given over to the graphic images emerging from the debacle as Russian forces stormed the building.
The page was only able to respond in that way because because the events unfolded during the course of the working day in London, and the editorial team were on hand. However, they don't work 24/7 on the homepage, so events that break over the weekend or at night were not getting covered very well.
The team therefore developed what became known as the 'Big Red Button' - which replaced the scheduled promo image with content dynamically pulled in from the BBC News feeds. The power to do this is password protected - and in a tech-team in-joke - initially involved a member of staff having to log on to a secure server, and literally press a big red button on the screen. After that it wasn't a giant leap to also have a 'Big Yellow Button' which pulled in the top story from the BBC Sport site. If you visit bbc.co.uk around midnight in the UK, you can sometimes see the buttons being put through their paces during overnight testing.
Even this approach wasn't enough for the events in London on July 7th 2005 - when the page went through a series of on-the-fly redesigns in order to get the latest public service information out to people in UK. There is a set on Flickr which illustrates how the design was progressively stripped down to minimize the amount of bandwidth used by the page, and maximize the amount of emergency information that could be published.
Another problem with dealing with news is being able to ensure that the editorial content elsewhere on the page is in keeping with the tone of the major news stories. When the 'Big Red Button' is pushed on the current BBC homepage, the 'popular searches' revert to some very neutral terms to avoid causing any potential offence or editorial clash. You wouldn't want the breaking news story to be about some anonymous footballer questioned over allegations of rape, and next door to it on the page quite by co-incidence there be the name of a prominent footballer in the 'popular searches' panel.
Problems still occur - only the other night the BBC homepage was running a promotion for the programme "How to Have a Good Death", when overnight the news broke of a ferry disaster in Bahrain. The editorial tone of the resulting homepage makes for uncomfortable viewing.
So, any final re-design of the homepage has to be able to react flexibly to big global breaking news stories, whether the editorial team are in the office or not. That brings with it some design contraints - just one example is that the images of a breaking news story will come in one of two fixed sizes from the BBC News site, so the page has to be able to still work and look fine with either of these size of images in place.
All in all it is quite a tall order for the team to get the design right for every circumstance - in advance.
Martin Belam
I thought I would take the time to define a bit more about the eight elements on my hypothetical reboot:bbc.co.uk competition entry, starting with my unified approach to carrying news and sport headlines.
For as long as the BBC homepage has carried news and sport headlines, it has simply displayed the most important couple of stories from each of these sections of bbc.co.uk. I always felt that the page could do a bit more than that, and wanted to try 'blending' some of the BBC feeds together.
My idea was to replace the segregated News and Sport boxes with a more generic headlines section that featured maybe between six and eight headlines. The content would be made up of a blend of several of the BBC's news and sport indexes. The default might be:
I reckon that including stories from the Entertainment index would give the page more of the lighter magazine feel it seems to have, as opposed to the 'hard news' feel of the BBC News homepage itself, and always ensuring there was at least one football story in the headlines box would adequately reflect the national obsession (and mine) with the sport.
The advantage of being able to mix'n'match the feeds would also be the ability to reflect seasonal events. So, for example, during the build-up to Wimbledon you could start including the top story about Tennis on the page, or in the run-up to an event like local elections in the UK you could add more political stories into the mix.
Mind you, for this to work well, you'd have to be pretty cute with the way the system progressively de-duped the headlines, otherwise a hypothetical story about 'an international celebrity footballer sustaining a serious injury whilst making a movie in the UK' could end up filling nearly all of the slots ;-)
In the end, I think that during user-testing most users would have struggled to distinguish where the sport headlines were if they were not sign-posted, so in my "coloured in" wireframe mock-up I have restored the BBC News and BBC Sport branding.
That can become problematic however. In fact - on Monday night I tried to put together what it would look like - and realised I probably needed to put more thought into this - or at least more logic in keeping sport and news apart. Theo Walcott's call up to the England World Cup squad made the BBC News UK index homepage and put an unwelcome BBC Sport cat amongst my BBC News headline pigeons.
The Google News homepage is probably the most high profile example of building a news headlines site out of computer algorithms. Myself, as a service, I think it is great for hunting down worldwide coverage on specific news stories by using the search, but I'd rather, in the end, that my news overview be put together by people who understand their audience and the wider issues behind stories.
That hasn't stopped some of the backstage.bbc.co.uk prototypes testing out ways of using machines to editorially select content - I particularly like Davy Mitchell's Mood News and Mood News - Good News prototypes. Perhaps a BBC 2.0 homepage would have a big interactive slider on it so users could choose whether they wanted good news or bad news from the BBC that day?
In fact, would a BBC 2.0 homepage restrict itself to just news stories from BBC News anyway? Some BBC News stories have featured a panel of related external links from alternative news sources, called 'BBC Newstracker'. I wondered if there would be some entries that take this idea a step further - using user-generated news sources like Wikinews, or user annotated sources like NowPublic.com alongside BBC content - and I see Daz's BBC Fluid entry has something of that ilk, with the inclusion of a "Citizen Journalism" panel on the re-designed page
Martin Belam
I think so far the reboot:bbc.co.uk competition has only had one entry which explicitly uses the Flash plug-in - Modern Grey by Sam. I've spotted some other gizmos on several other entries which could potentially be done with Flash, but I haven't seen anyone else expressly trying it.
The BBC site has been quite shy of using Flash for a couple of reasons.
Firstly there is the issue of how to provide alternative content for people who are unable to download the plug-in. The BBC generally used to attempt to provide a version of exactly the same content in flat HTML, but that approach has been relaxed in recent years, and the BBC now uses Flash for things like games on CBeebies, portal pages like the TV homepage, and content sites like Doctor Who and the BBC Two portal.
Secondly, there is the related challenge of accessibility. Even if people are able to download and get some experience of the content, it is often difficult to build good accessibility into Flash files - for example for space reasons any kind of controls or scroll-bars tend to be quite small and fiddly, which is of little use to people with poor motor control over a mouse or other pointing device.
These are two things to take into account when designing sites in Flash, as well as the fact that the content is invisible to search engines.
There is a good overview about making Flash accessible at usability.com with links to some resources, and you might also be interested in the accessibility guidelines from Macromedia themselves.
The BBC has actually already used Flash a couple of times in the promotional space of the current homepage, but like the BBC's TV portal page, it was ensured that users without the plug-in would still get the same kind of content.
Martin Belam
At this stage of a project within the BBC's New Media department you'd probably want to do some user-testing. You haven't built anything yet, but you may have a selection of visual treatments you'd like to get some responses from, and you would want to test the users interaction with the proposed page to see whether they can achieve tasks easily enough.
Before you've actually got the finished article to test there are a couple of different techniques you can use.
Paper testing is one, where you use visual mock-ups of the site, and ask people to point on paper to where they would click to perform certain tasks, and can gauge general reactions to visual designs. This isn't ideal, of course.
Building mock-ups for the screen is another option. This can be done in a couple of ways. I've seen it achieved by making a very large flat image of the design you are testing, and then making image map hot-spots to simulate where the HTML links would be. Alternatively, if you have very quick HTML developers in your team, a proof-of-concept demo page can do the trick even better.
The BBC does user-testing either by putting the work out to usability testing agencies, or conducting the tests in-house. Putting the work out to agencies has a strong advantage that people don't have to visit a BBC building. This can be really important if you are testing a new service, and you want to gauge how the user reacts to a vanilla version without any preconceptions about the BBC attached to it. For testing done in-house, the BBC sometimes invites people via message boards or via newsletters - making sure it gets to test new features on the exact people who will be using them.
The key thing with any user testing is to make sure that the tasks you ask the user to perfrom really show whether your solutions have met their goals. I'm not in a position to test the ideas for my reboot:bbc.co.uk entry - but I can at least specify which tasks I would have tested - and then I am going to make some assumptions about what would happen. I'd want to test the following things about my propsed redesign:
- I'm nervous about planning to merge the News and the Sports headlines into one block. One task would be to ask the user to find the Sports headlines, and see how long it takes them to succeed.
- I've proposed abolishing the directory - I'd want to ask users to look for some deep content, maybe a recipe, or information about a specific character in EastEnders, then observe whether they are successful just using search and the A-Z letters.
- I need to know whether My Inbox is going to work - I'd want to see users trying to set up access to an online mail service - is it easy? Do they trust the BBC with their details?
- Around the player area I would like to see a user demonstrate how intuitive they find it to change channels and programmes, and probably show them a couple of variations.
- I also want to find out if people value the editorial content, and that is something that I would hope the person conducting the test would be able to tease out during the session.
After a usability study is conducted, generally the BBC will receive a report with reccommendations. My best guess about my competition entry so far is that:
- People will find the lack of BBC News and BBC Sport headings confusing, and they should re-instated
- Links to popular content underneath the A-Z in a mini-directory would be useful for some users
- My Inbox is complicated, but users would trust the BBC with their details
- Users "liked" the idea of editorial content, but actually do not click on it very often.
- Users understand the concept of BBC One, BBC Two, News 24 much more than they understand the concept of BBC in-house departmental brands like Entertainment, Drama, Lifestyle etc.
At this stage the BBC would probably make some changes based on the reccommendations, and then proceed to the build phase of the project. But I'm my own boss for this design, so I'm going to carry on regardless ;-)
Martin Belam
So one of the biggest problems with any attempt at designing a homepage for the BBC, is the sheer, sheer volume of content that the page has to act as the primary gateway for.
In 2004 the UK Government's DCMS department carried out a review of the BBC's online activities, and it made a couple of observations about the homepage as it then stood:
Respondents felt the BBC Online homepage (www.bbc.co.uk) was too cluttered, with unhelpful or unfamiliar terms and links. It failed to give users an idea of the service's purpose and relevance to them.
and
The review's audience research presented some reservations about the design and ease of navigation from the BBC Online home page. Users, other than the very inexperienced, tend to be goal orientated, seeking to find a specific service or information as quickly as possible, but members of the public found the BBC Online homepage too cluttered and that it did not adequately serve as a guide to the rest of BBC Online.
It seemed to me at the time that the aim of reducing clutter, whilst at the same time giving all of the different types of homepage user "an idea of the service's purpose and relevance to them [my emphasis]" was a tall order.
There are, though, ways though of squeezing multiple chunks of content into the same small piece of screen real estate.
There is an example on the AOL.com homepage. They use DHTML to scroll the main promo area through the different tabs above it, so as you are on the page you gradually get to see the headline content from the news, entertainment, lifestyle, marketplace and specials sections. You can also use the forwards and backwards icon buttons to choose the tab you want to look at.
Yahoo!'s recently launched Tech portal has a different approach. Here at the top of the page are a series of "Today's top features". This is a block of Flash where topics are dragged into the foreground when the mouse hovers over them.
There are a couple of examples of this sort of behaviour on the BBC site as well. The Broadband portal uses Flash to deliver the main promotional area of the page, and users can scroll through some smaller promos on the right-hand side of the main unit.
The BBC's UK TV homepage also has a way of condensing multiple pieces of content into a small space. Instead of carrying details for each of the BBC's 4 main channels, they are grouped together in the "channel hopper". Clicking on the logo for each channels brings up a selection of links related to that channel.
Now, obviously, unless you are building a prototype of your new homepage design in Flash or HTML you won't be able to build moving widgets themselves - but there would be no harm in indicating on your pictures or wire frames, or in your accompanying notes, if there are areas of the page where you would like to include movement, or give users the option to scroll backwards and forwards or select different bits of content.
Martin Belam
When people talk about 'design' on the web they very often fall into the trap of only thinking about the visual design of a service or web site. In fact, you can see some of that in some of the entries to the reboot:bbc.co.uk competition, where people have re-coloured and moved around the existing blocks of content on the BBC homepage, without necessarily looking further at the functionality or the type of information on offer.
Absolutely key in this kind of re-design project is the technical design and the interaction design. In fact, in some ways they are more important to the success of a project than the pure visual design. If you've got a nicely funky valid and semantic XHTML/CSS driven site you can experiment with different visual approaches until you strike gold. If you've fundamentally got the design of your technical architecture or your interaction patterns wrong, then no amount of window dressing will make a system perform better.
Technical Design
Here you would investigate the kind of things like how much bandwidth will the new page take to serve? How quickly will the page load and render on different connection speeds? What are the maximum sizes you can allow for the images? Which bits of the page should you allow browsers to cache (like the 'Audio' and 'Video' icons) and which not (like the main promo area)?
For more complicated bits of the page, like how to get the news headlines displayed as quickly as possible, you'd probably want to draw up some workflows and technical architecture diagrams.
Often on projects within the BBC I would put together a "Technical Working Group" to iron out these issues. It would generally include all the technical staff working on the project itself, the BBC's overall technical architects, and key technical representatives from departments all around the BBC. In the case of the homepage it would be important to be talking to technical staff from places like news, sport, weather and travel, whose content is being integrated into the page. It might also include representatives from the companies who do the BBC's hosting and serving (mostly Red Bee Media and Siemens Business Services, formerly BBC Broadcast and BBC Technology respectively). With a geographical spread like that, often the meetings would be done by conference call, and tools like wikis would be used to foster collaboration on the finer details. On a big project like redesigning the BBC's homepage, you would probably need to get a technical sign-off from the head of the BBC's Technical Infrastructure group.
Interaction Design
Interaction design basically covers the areas of the page where the user is expected to "do" something. So, how does the user add bookmarks to 'My Bookmarks'? What happens when they try to change their weather location and the system doesn't recognise their postcode or town name? An interaction designer will often work alongside an information architect to define what kinds of feedback is given to the user when the system goes wrong, and how much information the users need to make the correct choices. As part of their work they would generally look at how other sites achieve these objectives, and try and incorporate the best of those practices into their own solution. With a lot of personalisation on my page design, the ease with which users can add their own details, register, logon, set their location and so forth will be critical to the page being successful and used how I have intended it.
Visual Design
I was being rather unfair earlier when I described visual design as the least important of the three design spheres - in fact for the end user it can be the most important - they want a service that looks nice and welcoming, and the fact that it is easy-to-use and will actually work is kind of taken for granted by them.
If you've ever visited any of my own sites you'll see that that visual design isn't exactly my strong suite - so I'm not really best placed to comment on it. One area though that I think will cause particular problems is that the level of personalisation on my page involves a requirement for a large number of controls - and therefore clutter: "edit this", "add that", "where do you live?", "sign in", "logout" etc. I'd be wanting to see several different sets of ways of sign-posting these visually in a way that freed up space on the page.
I'm not actually going to attempt a final visual design myself - instead I'm going to produce a wireframe that has been a bit "coloured in", which given my level of design talent seems safer :-)
Martin Belam
Now that I've got my list of ideas for my redesigned page, I've done a bit of research, and I'm sure who my target audience is, it is time for me to decide which of the features will make my final page.
There are a couple of different approaches to feature prioritisation used within the BBC's New Media department.
Common is an approach called MoSCoW, where features are divided into -
- those the software or service MUST have
- those the software or service SHOULD have
- those the software or service COULD have - perhaps in a v1.1 iteration
- those the software or service WOULD have - if time and budget were unlimited, or some other obstacle not in the control of the project team was removed.
The must-have features are then built first, and once those are finished, as many of the 'should have' features as possible are built until you run out of time or money.
Another approach is to score the features in a series of categories, and prioritise the build towards those features that score highest. This system is a bit more flexible. Categories might include:
- importance to target persona
- importance to meeting project objectives
- importance to future BBC projects - i.e. maybe some other service will rely on the output of this feature
- likely impact of feature (increased use and reach / press coverage / praise from blogs etc)
- Ashley Highfield has already told New Media Age the service will have this feature ;-)
I've looked at the original ideas I had, and decided that my redesigned page is going to have the following 8 elements:
News & Sport headlines
These will be combined into one panel
BBC iPlayer
The main feature of the page will be an embedded player with access to the BBC's on demand audio and video services
Search
A really, really big search box, leading to a really, really clever search system, alongside a display of some of the most popular recent search terms
A-Z
A list of the letters A to Z (plus 0-9 and special characters) leading through to the BBC's A-Z- Index
BBC Today / My BBC Today / Your BBC Today (the name of this bit probably needs to go to a focus group!)
Features daily editorial content, the weather and travel news
My Bookmarks/My Places
A section where users can save their own bookmarks from the BBC or the web, also displaying a list of recently visited pages on bbc.co.uk
My Conversations
A section where users can see their latest contributions to the BBC's message boards, and possibly their blog comments or message board contributions from around the web
My Inbox
Probably the trickiest to achieve both technically, editorially and policy-wise, I think users should be able to see the latest messages from their web-based email service from the BBC homepage
Now that I understand what I am going to build, I can go into the next phase, providing detailed designs for each of the elements on a technical, interaction and visual level.
Martin Belam
(...or should that be personae?)
The BBC's New Media department almost exclusively uses user-centred design processes when building new services or re-developing applications. Re-designing the homepage would be no exception. One of the key parts of this is to build "personas". These are tools that help you to imagine real users interacting with your service.
The basic principles of the process, and advantages are set out in this Boxes and Arrows article by Meg Hourihan - Taking the "You" Out of User: My Experience Using Personas. The best way to develop personas is to base them on real interviews in the first place, and then test your assumptions later with user testing of individuals similar to your persona.
A real example of this from the BBC was the work done to re-launch the search service in May 2002. The service was targeted at a fictitious user called Gail (or was it Mandy?) who was a married mother of two from Bromsgrove in the Midlands. The point of using her as the main target persona was to shape a service that would suit her needs, not just what was the most fun thing for the team to build.
We knew that people like her wanted to use the internet, particularly to help their children learn, but were very wary of it because of the kind of internet scare stories they had regularly read in the tabloid press. The point was to then find the things that the BBC could offer her that would appeal to her.
So the BBCi Search service ended up concentrating on giving results local to the UK, as Gail felt swamped by American content on the web. BBCi Search delivered clearly labelled tailored editorial results selected by the BBC, because Gail trusted the BBC brand more than the abstract concept of "the internet". Finally the service promised to be more family friendly than any other search engine.
Each proposed feature was prioritised according to how much it would meet Gail's needs and entice her to use the service. So, making the results available as a funky XML feed for techies was out, but a friendly spell-check prompt to help Gail's kids with their homework was in. Advanced search forms with lots of drop-downs and variables were out (or at least left undocumented), whilst contextual help with bright clear pictures was in.
For any re-design of the bbc.co.uk homepage, it is likely that the BBC would choose as its target persona someone who didn't currently use the service - what did it lack that prevented it from being set as their homepage?
For my theoretical entry to the reboot:bbc.co.uk competition, I could be lazy and just choose myself as the primary persona I was aiming at. However, that would end up being a page that was hideously geeky, consisting almost exclusively of Doctor Who, football, alt music and technology news - and defeats the point of using a persona.
So I'm going to choose a different persona to target the page at. They are someone who has used the internet for several years, but they are not a heavy user. They've tried a couple of "web 2.0" sites like Flickr, but only because they've been sent links from friends. They hate registering for things, and are distrustful of giving their personal details away. They are light users of the BBC site, but it is not set as their homepage.
I'm hoping that from my ideas I can pull together a set of features that will have them using the BBC as their homepage, and that will fully engage them with the potential of all of the on demand content the BBC has to offer, and all of the useful social interactive content that the web currently has to offer.
If you are interested to find out more about personas, there is a really good set of resources collected together by Dey Alexander at http://www.deyalexander.com.au/resources//uxd/personas.html
Martin Belam
Wendy Redred Robin mentioned the old BBC Online service myBBC on the reboot:bbc.co.uk message board earlier this week.
Launched in 2000, this was the BBC's first attempt at providing a personalised homepage for users. Once registered a user could select which panels of information they wanted to see - for example football news, or their saved recipes, or the latest from Radio One, or their local weather. They were also able to choose a colour scheme and re-order the panels into any sequence they liked.
At the time it was seen as an important enough service from the BBC to even feature in the standard left-hand navigation of every page on the site.
Behind the scenes however it was very hard work to do. A lot of the "panels" required bespoke XML schemes to syndicate the information - agreed light-weight interchange standards like RSS and Atom were still either in their infancy or some way off. The site also never gained a huge audience - in some ways that level of personalisation was ahead of its time for the BBC's very mainstream online audience.
It was shut-down in 2003, lamented by one of the team who worked on it (who used CSS on it to set colours an astonishing 2 years before that would be acceptable coding for general sites on BBC Online), some mobile users, and not very many other people it seems according to the report in The Register.
The collective memory of the BBC seems to have erased it. In fact, late last year I wanted to talk about the myBBC service in a presentation I was giving, and I couldn't find any screen shots of the service. The Wayback machine was no help, as it was locked out of the service because myBBC was a dynamic application.
In the end the best I could manage for my presentation was to get hold of some of the design concept work from one of the BBC's senior web designers. These at least give a feel of what the service used to look like. Maybe someone reading this, either inside or outside of the BBC, still has some full screenshot pictures tucked away somewhere?
Martin Belam
To really get to grips with any kind of new media project during the 'understand' phase, you'll need to do plenty of research. It is important to understand the marketplace, and the way people use existing sites and services, before you can develop a successful solution yourself.
For my reboot:bbc.co.uk homepage, I've concentrated my research into the following two areas:
What do people in the UK use as their homepages now?
The point of redesigning the BBC homepage is to get even more people using it, and for the people who do use it to have a more positive experience. So what do people in the UK have set as their homepage at the moment?
How do people access video clips on the web?
A key component of my redesigned page is going to be making it easier for more people to access the BBC's multimedia online content more quickly. I've been trying to find out where most people access their media from, and how much watching they do - should my page focus on showing which whole programmes can be watched - or should it be more like a showcase of trailers and clips?
If I was running this product design process as a project within the BBC, then there are two additional steps that I would take.
One would be to commission some research externally. What I would want done is some one-to-one interviews with people who don't currently use bbc.co.uk, and with people who do currently use bbc.co.uk but don't have it set as their homepage. I'd be looking for the research to help me understand
- Why these users have chosen the homepage they use.
- What kind of emotional engagement have they got with that page - looking at things like loyalty, trust, or whether it surprises them or is always predictable content.
- What are the common tasks they perform when online and starting from their homepage - i.e. do they generally search, check their email, follow the stories on the page and so forth
- Why don't they use the bbc.co.uk homepage as their homepage - what features is it lacking that they want or need from their choice of homepage.
The second thing I would want to do would be to put a survey on the BBC homepage itself to consult with the audience. Online surveys like this are something that the BBC does reasonably frequently - for example at the moment there is an online poll on whether the international edition of the BBC News site should take adverts, and in the past at the BBC I have set-up surveys of the audience on things like what they think of the BBC's email newsletter services. The kind of questions I'd want to ask would be:
- To gather demographic information on usage
- To ask whether the page is their homepage or not
- To ask how often they visit the page
- To ask what tasks they perform from the page - i.e. search, watch clips, check weather, navigate to specific place on bbc.co.uk
I'd also be interested to gauge how much interest there might be in some of the features that the BBC thinks are going to be key to the future. As Tim Dennell pointed out in a comment on my first post in this series:
By no means are all Internet users going to easily make the jump to RSS, video mobile downloads etc.
Older people (local radio listeners etc) find web 1.0 difficult enough.
I'd want to ask the users how often they watch video clips, or download music or video clips, and how much they'd like to if it was easier to do. Finally, I'd want to find out how many of them have heard of, or used, some of the services that are making up the Web 2.0 bubble - RSS, Flickr, del.icio.us, MySpace, YouTube etc.
All of this information will help with the next two steps in my product design process - building a persona of the audience I am aiming to reach, and prioritising the features that my reboot:bbc.co.uk homepage is going to have.
Jem Stone
We've had a few hiccups with our gallery so we've not published many of your entries in the past few days. Apologies if you've sent one in and its not up there yet. This is now fixed (thanks Ben!) and i'm clearing my inbox as quick as i can over the next 24 hours.
Martin Belam
Almost the only personalised element of the current BBC homepage is the weather forecast - and it is a salutary lesson in the importance of getting personalisation right. As a feature it generates more complaints in the homepage's email inbox than anything else. The complaints usually fall into two camps - the forecast was wrong, or the page got my location wrong.
Users get very frustrated when the page "forgets" where they live - this happens when a user's cookies are cleared or reset, which can happen frequently within corporate network environments for example. Promising and then failing to deliver personalisation really aggravates your audience, as experience working with the BBC homepage has shown me.
It was always a gripe of mine when I was at the BBC that the weather defaulted to Central London - I thought it made the Corporation look lazily London-centric. So along with one of my producers we hatched a plan to change it. The default location was going to move around the country. We picked a set of "representative" cities - Cardiff, Swansea, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester, Birmingham and so on. The idea was that for a week at a time the default location would be one of these places other than London. It would do two things:
- Show the BBC homepage acknowledged there was life in Britain outside Broadcasting House in WC1
- Demonstrate the functionality of that area of the page - that the location could be changed.
Anyone who had already set their weather cookie to a specific location would be unaffected - it would only be new users and those who hadn't ever entered their postcode into the site who would see the changes.
We started by moving the default location to Glastonbury to coincide with last year's music festival.
I was completely unprepared for the storm of protest that followed - the BBC received hundreds of emails complaining. Now, a good proportion of these must have come from irate Londoners who had never
had to set their postcode cookie because the weather forecast was always relevant to them. We hadn't changed anybody's personalised forecast, but we had changed the forecasts of people who perceived that the web site had detected they lived in London. The volume, and ferocity, of complaints though were enough for us to decide to abandon the plan.
So any design of homepage that relied on a lot of personalisation would also need to look at what happens when people can't access their personalised features - what is the default view for a user who "can't be bothered" with setting up lots of new features?
And what would a Web 2.0 version of the homepage's weather panel look like - assuming you still think there is space for the weather in your design.
Is it a video loop?
What about comparing the BBC's weather forecast with some forecasts from elsewhere?
Should it be restricted to UK locations, as it is now, or be international?
Or would you use one of the mapping services with APIs to put the icons onto their proper locations, and allow the user to scroll around to their location rather than using a postcode look-up?
Could it be interactive and also be a place where people can submit their weather reports - like "The People's Weather" idea on backstage.bbc.co.uk?
Or might it just also show somewhere where the weather is worse than the user's current location, to cheer them up?
Jem Stone
Eyedropper has shared some past and present BBC homepage designs and treatments in this Flickr gallery.
Martin Belam
The next step for my "entry" in the reboot:bbc.co.uk competition is to get down on paper all of the ideas that I have for features on the page. At this point I'm not looking at visual treatments, but more of a high-level look at functionality and the types of content I'll want to include.
In the BBC's New Media department, at this stage of a project it would be usual to hold some sort of workshop. For a small team it might just mean booking a meeting room for an afternoon, for a larger or strategic project it might involve moving people around the country, and booking a large space in one of the BBC's buildings. Re-designing the site's homepage is pretty much as big and as strategic as they come - so if I were running the project at the BBC I would be expecting to run a large workshop for between 25 and 50 people.
Inviting the right people is the key to making these events work. For re-designing the BBC homepage I'd expect to invite:
- The current editorial team working on the page
- The current technical, design and production team working on the page
- Heads of Design, Technology, Editorial and Product Management from the New Media department
- Representative senior executives and senior editorial, design and technical staff from BBC departments with a significant stake in the homepage - for example BBC News, Radio & Music, Children's departments etc.
- A few 'wild card' entries - people who I had worked with in the business on previous projects and knew to be good ideas people, or good at keeping a workshop going and presenting back to a large audience.
- Director-General Mark Thompson, Director of New Media & Technology Ashley Highfield, and wild 'wild cards' Jeremy Paxman and Gary Linekar (or similar non-web related "on air talent" as they are known). It is very unlikely that any of these four would be able to attend the whole day, but if planned well in advance you might be able to get one of them for half-hour at the start of the day to give a talk to kick things off.
For this kind of workshop I would devise something like the following set of tasks:
- Attendees get into groups of 5 or 6, and each group is given one of the three main themes of the bbc.co.uk 2.0 strategy: "Find", "Play" or "Share"
- Individuals in each group write down as many ideas they have for the page as possible for their given theme. Each idea needs a name and a one line description of what it is.
- Groups then move round, so that people who were "Finders" now become "Players", people who were "Players" now become "Sharers" etc. Taking the one-line pitches generated by another group, each individual picks one one-liner, and pitches it for five minutes to the rest of their group, writing out a longer description of the idea
- Groups move around again, so everyone will have covered all three bases (i.e. "Finders" became "Players" for the second activity, and will be "Sharers" for the third activity)
- Each group picks one idea from the long-form pitches they have inherited, and jointly work it up into a ten minute pitch to the whole gathering.
At the end of it there should be lots of one-line descriptions of ideas for the homepage, a paragraph long pitch of an idea from each attendee, and then from each group one long idea pitch. The benefit to the product development process should be that firstly you capture the ideas of a wide range of diverse opinions from within the organisations, and that secondly you spread emotional engagement with the project throughout the different departments and job disciplines.
Getting the balance of the groups right is important too. You want to make sure that the programmers are rubbing shoulders with the senior executives, and that the editorial staff are working with the people devising the strategy their content has to fulfil - they all depend on each other for the success of the BBC's products, but often have little opportunity to work together or appreciate the other's insight.
Of course, none of this is happening as I devise my theoretical entry for the competition - it is just me writing down ideas on a piece of paper. I've had a couple of sessions of it, and organised the ideas around the "Play", "Find" and "Share" themes. Here is what I've come up with:
Play
- "The Player" - now the BBC iPlayer - is embedded in the page, with some sort of channel selection mechanism
- News headlines and video
- Sport headlines and video
- Personalised Weather forecast
- Personalised Travel news
- TV Now & Next - clicking links to streams or downloads where available
- Radio Now & Next - clicking links to streams or downloads where available
Find
- Great big search box
- A-Z static navigation for non-searchers
Abolish the browse/directory static links section
Share
- Most recent newsletter
- Most watched clips
- Most emailed pages
- Some editorial content needed here - i.e. to give the page a Christmas feel at Christmas etc
- Busiest messageboard
- My Recent Pages
- My Bookmarks
- My Conversations
- My Inbox
So that is where I am up to. I need to work on these ideas a bit more, and the next thing I need to do is some research, and have some thoughts about the audience I am trying to reach, before deciding which of these ideas should make it to my redesigned page.
Ben Metcalfe
It's only been a matter of hours since the launch of the project, and already the comments are coming in thick and fast.
However there appears to be some concern from certain quarters around a perception of us "ripping the community off".
I think there has been some confusion around the purpose of the project, and so I’d like to take an opportunity to explain why we've set this competition up and hopefully address some of the confusion that may have occurred.
So it's time to go all "Points of View" for a moment with a round up of some of the criticism that have been expressed on the blog so far – and some response to the concerns put forward.
To kick-off, jay left the following comment on the blog:
What you are really asking for is numerous submissions of what is in essence a $million rebranding. Not a bad exchange for an apple laptop.
I think it's worth pointing out from the very beginning that we are not asking people to provide million £ rebranding for us. Indeed we are NOT going to use or commission any designs for the final front page. Yes, we will turn the winning design into the homepage for a day – but that's as a prize and as recognition for the winning producer's efforts (and if they really don't want us to, then we won't).
I would completely agree with jay that we would be ripping people off if we were going to turn entries submitted into the final homepage design. But that's not the objective of this competition.
Bob said:
…why not have "redesign the Ten O'Clock News" or "redesign The Archers" competitions.
Or you could do all this yourselves, which is what I'm paying you over a hundred quid a year for.
This is true – we could indeed have done this all by ourselves. One day, in the future, we could simply launch a new bbc.co.uk homepage for you.
We could say "This is what the BBC thinks is best for you. This is what the millions of people who use the homepage every week will use from now on. Here you go, now get on with it".
But not only does that not seem right, but that's not a BBC approach. Auntie doesn't always know best.
It's your homepage, (it's your BBC) and I want to offer everyone the opportunity to feedback to us what they want it to look like. I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable working on a project to redesign the bbc.co.uk homepage if the community hadn't been adequately consulted - and their ideas, desires and thoughts fed back into the process and acted upon.
Clearly if you don't want to participate then you don't have to – no one is forcing you to. But we know that there are many, many people who not only want to send us their ideas and participate in a project like this, but they complain to us when we don't give them an opportunity to!
The same is true from backstage.bbc.co.uk – the BBC's developer network run by the same team as this project. Have a look at the vast number of exciting, interesting and innovative prototypes the development community has produced with it.
They've done so in their own time because they want to. Clearly it's not for everyone, and no one is forcing anyone to code or design in their spare time for free. It might not be your dynamic, but for many building – or designing – cool stuff is a pursuit they not only enjoy but get many positives out of.
It's these kind of people we want to empower further with this project.
Craig Thomas said:
I'm thinking it's more 'cheap' than 'brave'. But that's a little pessimistic I guess.
…
I admit it will be interesting to see the result. I hope nobody gets ripped off in the process.
Hmmm, I think you are being a little pessimistic Craig. For a start, I don't think anyone should be entering this project purely to win the laptop. I envisage the overwhelming number of entries we receive will come from people who genuinely want to feed their views back into the BBC so that we can better serve their needs.
In fact, I would suggest that if you just want to win a laptop then there are plenty of easier competitions out there to enter.
We're providing the laptop as a prize because we do want to give the producer of the best entry something special as a thank you for their efforts.
And finally, Sean Murphy left the following:
Unbelievably cheap BBC, after the debacle over getting hold of full proposals, wireframes and pitch documents in the unawarded iMP project tender (we'll do it inhouse, thanks for all the ideas), they pull this to get some heavy lifting done and skim the best ideas for their empty creative larder.
Shocking. Shame on you BBC
Sean - we're not wanting to steal anyone's ideas, just like on backstage.bbc.co.uk where we go to great lengths to stress people's right to the Intellectual Property of the mash-ups they produce.
I specifically wanted to state the above in the terms and conditions, but to do so would have precluded us from even including your concepts in the final design – which defeats the objective of the project.
For example, you might think we need should create a natural language search engine as the primary navigation mechanism. We are not going to steal any graphics or designs you might include in your entry around that – but we do want the right to use that idea in our thought processes – that's the point of the project. That's why we've said the following in the Ts & Cs:
You acknowledge that the BBC may develop any such concepts without infringing your rights in any way. You further acknowledge the BBC’s right to develop and use any concepts and design elements incorporated in your entry, provided the BBC does not copy a substantial part of your entry.
The above represents the sentiment I've outlined in this post. We won't develop your concepts to the extent that they infringe on your (IP) rights, and we won't copy any substantial part of your entry. But clearly, if you're concept is top secret and NDA'd then obviously this project is not the right avenue to pursue it!
So, thank you for taking the time to read this post, I know it's a little longer than I would have liked.
But I wanted to communicate to you that this is a genuinely community-spirited project, there's nothing sinister, and we are not out to rip anyone off.
Perhaps the most important part of my job at the BBC is to act as the advocate of our audience. Whether it be as part of my work with the backstage.bbc.co.uk project, or wider still such as representing the views of the blogosphere on our recent blog project, it's a role that I accept with great responsibility and accountability to you all.
If you still have concerns I'd be happy to address them either publicly (leave a comment to this post) or drop me an email: ben.metcalfe@bbc.co.uk.
Regards,
Ben
Martin Belam
One of the first - if not the first - entries the BBC has received for the reboot:bbc.co.uk competition is Simply BBC by Chris McEvoy, clearly following on from the work done to produce Simply Google.
What interested me about this was the approach of splitting the BBC's search services out into nine boxes.
It is very similar to an approach tested by the BBC in 2001 when it was planning to re-launch the search service as part of the BBCi re-branding of the website. This was the first session of user-testing that I took part in at the BBC.
At that time going to the central BBC search page gave you an input box with a drop-down menu to select the 'scope' of your search - whether it covered BBC Online, BBC News, and one other option which escapes my memory - maybe BBC Sport? We knew from the email feedback that we were getting that a lot of users were failing to either see the drop-down options, or failing to comprehend their use.
So, we tested splitting the options up into seven search boxes. We found that at the time this approach didn't work very well at all with users who were either inexperienced at using the web, or users who were unfamiliar with the content of BBC Online. They were quite confused about where to enter their searches, and didn't understand brand terminology like "h2g2", even with the explanatory tag lines underneath each box. In the end the version of search that the BBC launched featured one unified search box, and then the results could be grouped into different collections by using a tabbed interface.
I'd love to see an approach like the Simply BBC one re-tested though. I think whatever design the BBC homepage takes in the future, getting the search element right will be crucial to its success.
Martin Belam
There has been a thread about the reboot:bbc.co.uk competition on self-confessed "News for nerds" site Slashdot this week.
The thread was titled "What Do You Want on a News Website?" and so a lot of the discussion was about how people would redesign http://news.bbc.co.uk rather than the BBC homepage, but a couple of interesting things came out in the thread.
One was that the requirement for personalisation wasn't just about what you want to see, but also about what you don't want to see, but also what you don't want to see.
SomethingBig wrote:
The thing is, local & national news, traffic, weather, etc - I want them all. But I want them in a way that's not cluttered. Not over loaded with information... - click the heading and the section unfolds. I'd also like the choice to disable certain sections if I didn't like them - something like Google's homepage is for Google's account holders.
Personalisation of content was king with the Slashdot crowd
I currently get my news from three places: My Yahoo!, Netvibes (when I get comfortable enough about their privacy practices, it'll be my new home page), and Google News. The thing they have in common is the ability to do massive customization of their home page.
it would be cool if there was some kind of "stories you may like" feature made, that pulls together some keywords. So if you tend to read stories about gas prices, and there is a story about record breaking oil costs, it would go on some kind of separate personalized list.
One idea I thought had potential was a kind of half-way house between full personalisation and the current one-size-fits-all homepage that the BBC has. foundme said:
there should be a few templates (for on the spot makeover) to cater normal users who can't be bother to customize the site. Eg an Entertainment-Template will have more news on entertainment-related news, and a bit of other news.
I liked it a lot - the idea that users don't have to fill in some lengthy set of options, but could instead just say I'm a "football" kind of person, or a "Holby City" kind of person, or a "Tweenies" kind of person, or a "Radio 4" kind of person, and get a homepage that wasn't totally personalised, but suited them better.
Whilst again it was news focused, I also liked this comment by grogdamighty:
I'm not a coder or in web design, so I can't tell you how to make a simple but elegant interface. I can tell you what should be readily apparent to anyone asked these questions: I want exactly what I want, when I want it. That's what I like about Google News - if I want sports news on top, that's where I put it; if I want a custom search for all new pharmaceuticals, I can do it. Major news websites should take note that people want to be able to decide what news they see.
There's a reason why most people flip directly to a specific section of the newspaper. It's time the newspaper flipped for us.
The current bbc.co.uk is more magazine than newspaper, but the BBC should still find out how to make it flip for the audience.
Respect was due to one Anonymous Coward (as Slashdot brands contributors who don't register) who said:
You do realise that news is only a small portion of what the BBC does, right?
My favourite comment though was from baadger:
Do you think they'd notice if I submitted their old design [archive.org] as my own and claimed that laptop? xD
Funnily enough Slashdot has also launched a competition to redesign their site, and the co-incidence was picked up on by JavaScriptSearch in a news item yesterday. Slashdot has a gallery of competition entries online. I see that whilst the BBC is getting criticism that a design competition is ripping people off, Slashdot is getting entertaining entries with annotations like:
I added some fins to lower wind resistance. And this racing stripe here I think is pretty sharp
The funny thing about it is that as far as I can tell, Slashdot intend to fully implement the CSS of their brand new freebie winning design permanently, whilst the BBC don't.
Andrew Webb
Hello, my name is Andrew and I’m the picture editor for the bbc.co.uk homepage. I’ve been at the BBC since 2002 and along with Martin, Ben and Jem I’ll be chipping in a few thoughts to this blog.
Firstly, I thought I’d do a quick walk through the visual history of the BBC’s online offering, then about some of the day to day editorial issues we face and why they’re about to get even more interesting.
We’ve been online for over ten years now, Though I’d say the ’97 election and other events that year was our ‘coronation moment’. Here’s a grab of the homepage from around that time, a time of 14.4k modems, 16bit colours and 15” screens.
It was changed around 1998, to look like this, and was named BBC Online. By this time each department was in a gold rush to get some sort of online presence and the site was growing fast.
Sometime in 2001 it was updated again to this design With a much larger main image and an attempt to stop it growing down the page. That drop down programme listing lasted until 2002, and got so big as our complimentary online output grew. A few services were present on this version, including ‘have your say’ and the first introduction of search. This was also the creation of BBCi which saw the overarching brand cover online and interactive TV.
2002, saw what is referred to as ‘the glass wall’ redesign. This saw the introduction of the patina, where your clicks were tracked and added together so that area’s you used a lot got lighter and areas you did used got darker. It also had a swatch of 12 colours that could be applied to the page to compliment the main promotional image. Seach is expanded again as our content continues to grow, and ‘popular searches’ is added.
This was quite an extensive redesign and we put a book together containing all our thinking called ‘The Glass Wall’ [8meg PDF]
2004 saw the page rebranded to bbc.co.uk and a new logo was designed and it’s this design we had now. The page is now a light blue, though we’ve changed it for things like Children in Need to yellow and red.
Over the past two years I’ve been instrumental in trying to reshape the page for specific editorial events, from the culmination of Doctor Who, to England winning the Ashes, to the landmark planet earth series. Being topical and reflecting the voice of the nation is a key task the BBC is charged with.
Also here’s some things that until now haven’t seen the light of day. A 1945-ification of the page that we considered for WWII anniversary, and a Guest Editor idea that didn’t get off the ground.
So that’s a really brief tour around how we got to where we are. We’ve come quite far, but we’re looking for a paradigm shift in our thinking now. Why? Because I think the way we can offer content is starting to change. Here’s what used to happen. A show would go out to broadcast, and the homepage and other parts of the site would carry abridged versions of what happened in the show. So you’d have some images, and character biog, or a more in-depth look at the issues in the show. And despite all the redesigns over the years we still do that to a certain extent. What the 2.0 project is partly about is ‘what does the page look like when you can get 10,000 hours of telly through it’.
So, if you’d like some sort of editorial steerage to help frame your design thinking, consider how we’d handle say the World Cup, if you could have all the BBC entire World Cup output at your fingertips.. Now think that at the same time Wimbledon is on, and there’s a dozen other things happening like Chelsea flower show or local elections, all of these have past and live BBC output.. and people might want all, some or none of these things in different sizes and ways, from live HD video right down to portable sized chunks. And consider that ancillary content is now being generated, so there’s world cup blogs, head gardener blogs, interactive guides, player information, and a billion other things…. Makes your head hurt sometimes!
For more about what we’ve done in the past see my blog.
Good luck, If you've any questions or thoughts contact me via Ben
Andrew
Martin Belam
One thing that the BBC homepage team have to deal with, and which your prototypes or competition entries might face - is how to deal with duplicated news stories.
I don't mean that the journalists at BBC News have made a mistake, but that some stories will appear in more than one 'index' on the BBC News site, and some will appear on both the BBC Sport and BBC News sites. Take for example the story that Sven-Goran Eriksson is going to leave England after the World Cup. On the day it was announced it was certainly the most important story on the BBC Sport homepage index. However, if a story in the world of sport is big enough, it will also get to the top of the BBC News UK edition homepage index.
A couple of years ago that would have meant the bbc.co.uk homepage showing the story twice - once as the main news headline, and once as the main sport headline. This was really unsatisfactory from an editorial point of view - and also looked bad visually, because the two blocks on the homepage would have the same thumbnail image.
The solution employed takes a look at the two RSS feeds for the BBC News UK edition homepage index, and the BBC Sport UK edition homepage index, and removes from the BBC Sport feed any stories that also appear in the top of the news feed. So, when a sports story is big enough to dominate the news, it only appears once.
The system isn't perfect though. For example if the top story in the Sports feed was about David Beckham, it might also feature in the News feed - so would appear in the news panel on the homepage. However, the sport feed might also have a reaction piece to the story, featuring the same picture of David Beckham as the story's image. In that case, although two different stories would be on the BBC homepage, the thumbnail images would be the same.
On other occasions, the BBC News journalists might take a story from the BBC Sport site - 'clone it' - and then re-write it slightly. In this case although to the human eye these look like the same stories with the exception of a few style details, to a machine they are completely different stories with different IDs, so wouldn't be de-duped.
In fact the edge cases around the de-duping script are so numerous, that realistically the only way the BBC could guarantee never having any problems in this area would be to replace the machines doing the de-duping with an editorial eye specifically looking after the balance of stories on the homepage, with the ability to edit, remove or over-type the headlines appearing on the page. For the few occasions that the duplication happens, it has never been considered worth the investment required.
I suspect that the entries that get shortlisted for prizes at the end of this competition will include a good few that have done something interesting with the way the BBC presents news on the bbc.co.uk homepage. And especially those that have found a better way to exploit the mass of up-to-the-minute rich audio/video content that BBC News now produces online.
Martin Belam
The reboot:bbc.co.uk competition has got a few mentions in the media - but mostly on the back of articles claiming "The BBC is going to turn bbc.co.uk into MySpace.com" or exclaiming "Oh-my-god-they-killed-Grandstand".
There has been a bit of coverage on blogs as well. Frankie Roberto has already commented on this site and linked to his round-up of the BBC's Creative Future initiative and his thoughts on this competition. reboot:bbc.co.uk was also noted on quickonlinetips, WebUser, and David Lee King thought the whole BBC 2.0 thing was 'wow'.
Bill Kinnon suggested on Achievable Ends that the sudden flurry of BBC engagement with Web 2.0 a was news event led:
I think the Beeb is wise enough to recognize that the days of traditional media are over. Its own experience with last year's London Bombings and the content from average people on the scene - helped it realize the importance of citizen content.
How it manages and links that content will be critical to its viability as a Web 2.0 media resource.
I'm actually excited by the potential of a properly catalogued, citizen media enhanced, BBC site. Time will tell.
Meanwhile over in Norway, Oaø on Undercurrent joined some of the dots between various new media initiatives the BBC has going on at the moment:
Since the BBC usually have led the way for other public service broadcasters - showed them how to innovate - it's always interesting to note BBC ideas. Now their thinking seems to be veery far ahead of their peers such as our NRK. Another example is the Creative Archive project. BBC Backstage yet another...
Martin Belam
I haven't fully checked the legalese of the competition - which I suggest you do if you are planning to enter as there are some quite important bits about which types of BBC content you can and can't include in any working prototypes - but I'm working on the assumption that the standard clause that employees of the BBC, their relatives, and their pets, cannot enter the competition also stretches to apply to people writing on the competition blog.
That doesn't mean, of course, that I haven't got lots of ideas of what I would want to do to the homepage, having had a role in managing it for 18 months. During that time I didn't oversee any permanent design changes to the page - having inherited it after the last major re-design in May 2004, although I did take part in the previous re-design before that in 2002.
So what I thought I might do for this blog over the next couple of weeks is gradually describe how I would have put a competition entry together, and hopefully along the way illustrate how this kind of project gets done within the BBC once it has been commissioned.
Most new media projects at the BBC start with an 'understand' phase - where the project team try to get a handle on what has been commissioned, what the objectives are, what the audience requirements are, what the technical constraints are etc, so that they can move on to the 'design' phase.
(In fact - I spotted the following in the reboot:bbc.co.uk FAQ: "In BBC design language this is just our understand phase. We will be using this competition and a lot of other analysis to help us understand what bbc.co.uk should be...one day.")
The first thing that I want to establish, as part of my 'understand' phase, are the things that absolutely have to be on my page - so I started by making a list of those. In any project it is good to get these things defined up-front, so you don't suddenly get surprised at the end when you have all the designs signed off, and then somebody pipes up with "but where is the...".
I think there are five things that any design of homepage at http://www.bbc.co.uk has to have.
BBC logo or branding
Dull but true - unless anyone can show me a major portal page without a logo.
Legal blurb links
Also dull but true. Well, I don't know if it actually is a legal requirement to carry them on the front page of the site, but it is good manners to have your terms and conditions of use and privacy policy displayed at the front door.
Search box
It doesn't matter how many other links there are on the page - if you've got a website with literally millions of pages, like the BBC has, people are going to need to be able to search it.
The News
Although the BBC has a perfectly good news based front page at http://news.bbc.co.uk, the page at http://www.bbc.co.uk still attracts an audience seeking the latest news, especially during major news events. The 'news' section heading link is the most clicked link on the current BBC homepage, and on July 7th more people in the UK visited www.bbc.co.uk to find out news about the bomb attacks in London than visited the two largest non-BBC news websites in terms of figures (Sky and the Guardian) put together. Now, I should point out that I've no idea yet if the news on my page is going to be a list of headlines, an embedded video, or a robotic voice reading the headlines out to me like Ted Gilchrist's Rebotocast of BBC World News Feed backstage.bbc.co.uk prototype. However, I know there is going to be some news on my redesigned page.
Contact the BBC link
It isn't just another case of good manners, although I think it is good practice for all web sites to have prominent 'contact us' details. I think as a Licence Fee funded organisation in the UK there is an obligation for the BBC to use the new media channels as a way to improve and increase accountability - and being able to get straight in touch with the BBC from the homepage fits the bill for that.
Arguably there may be a sixth required item. All pages on the bbc.co.uk site have a link through to a low graphics or text only version for accessibility reasons. At the moment I am assuming that my new page is going to be so brilliantly coded that it will be a beacon of accessibility in the web landscape. However, I'm going to keep that under review, and note that there is a requirement to check at a later stage in the project whether the page is fully accessible, or whether it needs links to a more accessible version placed on the page.
OK, so that's me done ;-)
Well, my entry is very "classic Google"-like so far isn't it? In fact it isn't that dissimilar to the BBCi Search homepage that used to be on the BBC site - all you need to do is add the News feed in there, and you've got it.
Still, it is far too early for me to be dealing in visuals yet. The next step will be to have an ideas generating session where I try and think of all the things that I might want to put on the re-designed page.
Martin Belam
Last night on the message board Suerat suggested I'd missed something rather large out of my overview of what the different parts of the current BBC homepage are called - "the huge, empty white band down the right hand side of the screen".
The fact that the BBC homepage is at a fixed width and locked to the top-left hand corner is a point that has been raised a lot, especially with the increasingly common use of larger monitors. It is especially noticeable when the homepage features darker colours - as Doug pointed out on the board and eyedropper recently discussed when looking at the design of the page for the recent Planet Earth series promos.
From a coding and visual design point of view, the problem really stems from the need to have a fixed width image in the promo space. The picture necessarily fixes the width of the right-hand column to 483 pixels wide. If the page was allowed to stretch out to the width of monitors with resolutions at 1024 or 1280 pixels wide, you'd end up with the left-hand column twice as wide as the column with the promo, which I think would look even more unbalanced.
And don't forget, not everybody is viewing the page on an ultra-modern 21 inch flat screen monitor. Last year when the page design was changed for the one-off Dalek special - the BBC received nearly as many complaints that the Dalek took up the whole screen and that people had to scroll down to reach the contents, as it did that the page had a big white stripe down the right-hand side. The content was only 450 pixels down the page, which implies that the people who were complaining about scrolling were using machines with screen displays only in the 600s x 400s.
This is a theme that I will come back to a few times over the course of this blog - the extent to which the BBC homepage has to cope with a long tail of legacy technology to provide a service to all users.
One solution, of course, might be to leave the contents fixed at 770 pixels wide, but to centre align the content, so that at least both sides of the page get an evenly matched empty white stripe. Another solution might be to rid the design of a large fixed width image as the principle focus of the page - which is, I guess, where this competition comes in.
Jem Stone
Although the papers and pre-publicity focused on the imminent demise of Grandstand. today at the BBC actually saw a raft of strategic announcements by BBC bosses (blogged live by Newsnight's Paul Mason) trying to articulate how they see the creative future of the BBC by 2012.
It also meant the first "official" announcement of this competition.
BBC New Media & Technology today announces a competition to re-design and re-imagine the bbc.co.uk home page in the Web 2.0 world.
The competition (open.bbc.co.uk/reboot) asks individuals not only to re-design the homepage, but also to take it back to the drawing board so that it exploits the functionality and usability of services such as Flickr, YouTube, Technorati and Wikipedia.
Entrants will also need to think about how their design will help future users of the site find their way through millions of pages of content, as well as being able to play and navigate hundreds of hours of BBC Television and Radio.
Tom Loosemore said: "We've recently started a project to reassess the entire BBC website. Inviting people to contribute via this competition is an essential component of that work.
"Given our publicly-funded status, we're delighted that the open nature of the Web offers the BBC's users the chance to contribute their own ideas directly into the creative process. It is, after all, their website."
If you dig around the Press Office site there's also some key announcements that will give you further food for thought in developing ideas for the competition as well as obviously the full text of Mark Thompson's speech which oddly i can only find on Media Guardian so that means its registration required.
Martin Belam
Over the next couple of weeks I'll be looking at some of the ways that the current BBC homepage works. I thought I'd start by just breaking down the page into the component parts, with a brief description of what each bit is, and what it is called. That way, later on if I start using rather obscure phrases like "the Wonderland footer" or "the Today bar", you'll hopefully know what I'm talking about.
Toolbar
At the top of the page is the site-wide toolbar. I've written before on the web about how it serves the purpose of providing navigational 'glue' across the BBC site.
Banner
The banner area contains the BBC branding, links through to the text only version of the page and the BBC's Accessibility help site, as well as the switch to move users between the UK and International editions of the page.
Search
The search box contains radio buttons to select the type of search to perform, the search box itself, and a list of three recent popular searches across the site. There is also a link through to the BBC's "zeitgeist" page - Popular and New.
Promo
The promo area usually contains an image and a series of links to BBC content, and sometimes links to external websites as well. It is produced by an editorial team specifically for this page.
Browse
The browse section contains links through to various sections of the BBC's site, divided into 12 top level categories. The links contained in it are relatively static, although they do occasionally change as services and sections are closed, or new services appear.
Today
The today bar achieves two things. Visually it acts as a focal point to divide the page into "the upper tier" and "the rest". It also makes the page render left-to-right, so that the promo area loads before the lower sections of the page.
News
The news box carries two or three of the top headlines from the UK edition of the BBC News homepage. The heading link 'News' is the single most frequently clicked link on the BBC homepage.
Sport
The sport box carries two or three of the top headlines from the UK edition of the BBC Sport homepage.
TV
The TV panel is used to promote upcoming programmes on BBC television. The editorial choice of what to promote is made by the same team who produce the UK edition of the bbc.co.uk/tv homepage, though they do not necessarily feature the same content.
Radio
The radio panel links through to all of the BBC's main radio networks. Unlike the TV panel the content is usually static.
Children's
The Children's panel contains the logo "bugs" for the BBC's two UK children's television services CBBC and CBeebies.
Where I Live
This panel contains a weather forecast - which can be personalised by entering your postcode into the BBC site. Based on that postcode the page also displays localised links to Action Network and the user's nearest local BBC site, as well as localised events listings for cinema and music. There are also links through to the BBC's national site's for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as the Welsh language Cymru'r Byd site, and the Gaelic language Alba site. This section used to have additional links to more regionalised content, specifically more general events listings - but the BBC's central /whatson portal was closed down after the publication of the Graf report.
A/V banner
This strip acts to balance up the columns on the right-hand side of the page, and contains links to information on how to get the plug-ins required to view or listen to the a/v content available from the homepage.
Wonderland footer
This footer is named after the "World Wide Wonderland" marketing campaign for bbc.co.uk that ran in May 2004. Originally each panel linked through to a campaign specific microsite at bbc.co.uk/wonderland. Now the panel features a rotating selection of marketing promos which take the user through to varied BBC online sites and services.
Corporate footer
This strip contains links through to corporate information about the BBC. It is home to links through to the Press Office, and the BBC Jobs site, as well as having links through to contacting and complaining to the BBC
Footer
The footer contains links through to things like the BBC's Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
That covers just about everything on the regular page - but there are a couple of other bits of terminology I'm sure you will hear mentioned on the reboot:bbc.co.uk blog from time to time - "the Semi-Permanent Panel" or "SPP", the "Rotorvator", and the "Jumbo Promo".
Semi-Permanent Panel or SPP
This is a small panel containing either static links, or sometimes dynamic headlines generated via RSS, which is inserted into the page either above or below the Today bar. It gives the editorial team a way of retaining some editorial content about big events like Glastonbury, or news coverage like the aftermath of the July 7th London bombings, whilst being able to either use the "main" promo space more visually, or to use it for something else altogether.
Rotorvator
The Rotorvator is a version of the normal promo area of the page, but instead of one static image, JavaScript is used to rotate through a series of images.
Jumbo Promo
The Jumbo Promo is a version of the page where the "promo" section expands to fill the place where the search box usually is. The search box is then dropped down into the top of the browse section.
Hopefully, I've covered everything there, but I am sure to have forgotten something.
Jem Stone
A fortnight ago my boss Ashley Highfield gave a lengthy interview to weekly trade mag; New Media Age. I'm quoting it a length because when thinking about some of the ideas for the competition its the best summary of the BBC's New Media strategy so far. This is also the source for this quote which you'll find elsewhere on the site which clearly states the BBC's future homepage direction.
What we need to do is come up with a personalised BBC homepage that will provide people with a starting place for their journey through the BBC's content and beyond. We might do this in partnership with some existing services, but we absolutely don't want to replicate anything that's already out there. We want to weave the BBC's content into something that reflect's people's interests, tastes, friends and so on.
Ashley Highfield
Source: New Media Age April 13 2006
There are five main strands to our new media strategy:
1) The first focuses on what you might call our "legacy" products. For example our News web site, our parenting site or some of our educational sites that form the core of our remit to inform, educate and entertain.
2) The second strand focuses on moving our audio visual assets into the on-demand space so we can make our content available at any time anywhere. The Integrated Media player is a good example of this.
3) The third element looks at user generated formats that will allow us to be the digital campfire around which the audience can gather and share stories. This encompasses everything from our Action Network and Film Network through to our message boards. We plan to start weaving all of that together.
4)The fourth element will see us start commissioning highly innovative new formats that are very much focused on new media. We want to develop edgy content that uses the power of the audience, the wisdom of crowds, the interconnectivity of networks.
5) The final aspect is building on what we've always done: to act as a trusted guide to the Web. We want to develop world class navigation that will provide really easy access, not just to the BBC's content but to all great British content available on the Web.
All the products we're planning to launch fall into three main categories Find, Play and Share.
Play
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Play is best exemplified by iMP, which allows viewers to download BBC TV and Radio programmes up to seven days after they are first broadcast. The Creative Archive and streaming our channels via multicast also falls into this category.
Find
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Find relates to the next generation of navigation - Web 2.0 stuff like recommendation engines and social software. We'll be overhauling our search engine to make an absolute step change in next generation navigation across the web, mobile and iTV. This is a massive project in its own right.
Share
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This is the public service version of something like Myspace, or Flickr. In the last few months we've seen an exponential rise in the number of people registering on bbc.co.uk. A year ago we had only a million people signed up the site, four months ago it was 2m, now it's 3m. We have a monthly UK audience of 15m and we're starting to get to the point where we can get them to participate. I'm looking at the next-generation formats that really allow us to get our online audiences involved. We want them to feel ownership of our content, take control of it and then share it with each other.
I've been working closely with BBC director general Mark Thompson on defining this. It's really our role now for the next five years. it's clear that making all of audio visual assets available on demand, for example, is a long term project.
All of this is very much a long term strategy, but by looking at it in terms of find, play, and share, what i want to do over the next 18 months is to get the first products well on their way.
What new BBC services are to made available to the public?
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The iMP will be closely followed by our next generation search service. this will combine all of the core, traditional skills of the BBC with the power of a search engine like Microsoft's. I want people to ask any question and answer straight away via the Web, mobile or iMP. I want a new type of service that combines the best of BBC editorial with the best search technology.
What other services are you currently working on ?
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We're trying to knit existing products like the Creative Archive and the Action Network together so that viewers can go into their own BBC space containing all the content they're interested in, all the TV programmes they like and all the things they've played around with. What we need to do is come up with a personalised BBC homepage that will provide people with a starting place for their journey through the BBC's content and beyond. We might do this in partnership with some existing services, but we absolutely don't want to replicate anything that's already out there. We want to weave the BBC's content into something that reflect's people's interests, tastes, friends and so on.
Working with others
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We're currently working on major projects with Microsoft and some of the other usual suspects. you'll start to see some really good stuff in the next few months that'll prove I mean what i say about forming partnerships within the industry while maintaining my belief in open standards and accessibility for all.
How important is new media to the future of the BBC ?
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The BBC has a role to innovate, to take risks, to be the creative R&D of the nation, as Culture Secretary; Tessa Jowell once put it. It's up to us to try new things and to share our learning. After the false start of 1999, the Internet has finally arrived. By that I mean the Internet as a content medium. It has already proven itself as a transactional and a communication medium, but there's no doubt now that the audience is there and consuming voraciously. This is reflected in the BBC's strategy. For the Corporation to remain relevant in the digital age, it has to make all of its content and services available in whatever form people expect to consume them.
Martin Belam
...if The Simpsons has achieved one thing, it has made writing this kind of personal introduction make you inevitably sound like Troy McClure.
The team running the reboot:bbc.co.uk competition have invited me to contribute to this blog, even though I don't work for the BBC. Well, not anymore, anyway. I did work there in the New Media department for five years, and ended up as one of the Senior Development Producers. I left just before Christmas 2005, but for the 18 months or so before that, one of the areas of the BBC site that I looked after was the homepage that this competition is all about redesigning.
When I was at the BBC I used to write about it quite a lot on my own blog at currybetdotnet, and I also used to be a host on the Points of View message board about bbc.co.uk. Although I'm not a techie, I even managed to submit a prototype to backstage.bbc.co.uk when it first launched - although it doesn't work anymore. I also used to (mostly) lurk on the mailing list there.
Over the next couple of weeks I hope to contribute on here a bit of an insight into both how the existing homepage works and why it works that way, take a look at some of the homepages the BBC has had in the past, and post about the issues the BBC has to consider in terms of the technology it uses and the audience it serves. And I'll be hanging around on the message board as well.
Ben Metcalfe
The Winner
The winner will receive a high end Apple laptop, a visit to the BBC and have their design implemented and showcased on the bbc.co.uk homepage later this summer.
The Runners Up
At least ten of what the BBC has to call "MP3 Players" are in the offing. The number and range of runner up prizes is more likely to be dependent on the volume and quality of entries.
All entries
All valid entries will be showcased on open.bbc.co.uk/reboot/
Judging.
Ultimately the winner will be judged by a panel of judges chaired by the BBC's Director of New Media and Technology; Ashley Highfield. For more see our FAQ or About reboot:bbc.co.ukt page
Ben Metcalfe
This site and competition isn't just about showcasing your submitted entries. But we've also asked some top! Web 2:0 designers to come up with ideas to get you thinking, a team of bloggers will be on hand to try and bore explain just how the bbc.co.uk homepage (its actually several pages) works in mind boggling detail and we'll be feeding back on your feedback and entries. We've also dug out some past designs going back to the last century in case you're thinking we're in need of a retro look.
Thanks for listening and we're looking forward to joining the conversation about what the BBC homepage is really for.
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