Reboot bbc.co.uk

Building my rebooted:bbc.co.uk homepage - #2: Generating ideas

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

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.

• 01 May 2006 12:46