Building my rebooted:bbc.co.uk homepage - #3: Research
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.
- 05 May 2006 15:59
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Hmm.. Why do you whant the users make bbc.co.uk their homepage? ;)
>> Why do you whant the users make bbc.co.uk their homepage?
Because in the UK they've already paid for it so they ought to get some use from it?
I wonder if people using the BBC homepage as their browser homepage and people who just use it as the first page they go to (maybe via a bookmark) to use the BBC website want different things from the page?
Perhaps the former set of people are more interested in the regularly changing stuff and the latter are more interested in the directory style lists of links to act as a 'way in'.
hi again martin,
i enjoy reading these blog entries of you, although i dont really get your point. i mean the things you write are all ok but dont expect all of the people who enter in your contest to think about all the stuff you briefly mentioned in these past entries.
i am really trying to make my entry as much self explanatory as i can but then again im sure there will be a percentage of users who will say something like "thats stupid/not logical" in terms of usability.
what i am trying to say is that altho you sure try to be helpful to the people by trying to understand the bcc website, not everyone has a team of 20 or more people backing them up :)
ill try to put together a pdf file with my concepts for the site with explanatory images (e.g. screenshots of the site) by the closing date.
hope to read more stuff from you.
v
As a fledgling web developer/graphic designer, I really enjoy reading these blog posts. Even though I don't have a team of 20 people working on my contest entry with me, it really helps me get into the mode of thinking used by professionals to tackle such projects.
I think it does help to give contestants some insight into how these development projects are carried out by professionals in the industry. The process you describe makes a lot of sense, and I find myself following a similar planning process as yours.
Anyways, thanks for providing some insight into the professional development process such projects entail. It gives those of us aspiring to be professionals in the field one day something to model our own development process after.
Hi v & Calvin, thanks, I hope the posts are useful.
I'm hoping that they will help people understand the processes the BBC undertakes, but also understand some of the constraints that the BBC works within - but I certainly don't expect you to worry about all of that when putting together entries to the contest.
I think half of the point of this competition for the BBC is to see what people make of the homepage if they *don't* carry around all the baggage of "well, we can't do x on the page because y% of the users will not like it", or "we can't do z because it would be difficult to pursuade depatments a, b, and c within the BBC that it is a good idea"