Reboot bbc.co.uk

Building my rebooted:bbc.co.uk homepage - #4: Personas

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

• 07 May 2006 14:48