Coping with News 'surge' events
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.
- 12 May 2006 14:41
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