Building my rebooted:bbc.co.uk homepage - #13: My Conversations
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.
- 17 May 2006 12:47
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