Reboot bbc.co.uk

Configure and Share

Charlie

Sifting through the vast spaghetti soup of BBC content is tricky. The best approach is to provide users with multiple ways of slicing the content. My vision is of a BBC homepage where nothing is sacred except the BBC logo & a text only link; everything else is configurable. And for customise-a-phobes, surfing grannies, old skool aficionados and the like, why they can just pick from a selection of ready-made homepages – with a generic default homepage for those who choose not to sign up.

The BBC homepage should provide the following views into content:

1. latest - the default homepage shows the latest info in the categories users have identified as important to them 2. popular - top content from the users' categories as measured by consumption by other users 3. editorial choice – the “picks” tab; and the “favourites” tab. The distinction is that “picks” are specifically identified as homepage content by BBC editorial teams, and “favourites” are your bookmarks from around the BBC 4. random/explore – the “mosey” tab

Users who sign in can choose to add or exclude categories of information from these sliced views – they can configure:

(a) the grey menu bar

In the example, I've chosen my own categories and renamed the menu items. Any items that have subcategories have a grey arrow to the side. Mousing over this arrow activates the submenu dropdown. A user can also nest subcategories within other subcategories, as denoted by a grey arrow next to the relevant subcategory item. So, the a-z category is simply a link to the A-Z index, so there is no grey arrow. However, the “animal magic” category has multiple subcategories as shown, as does the “nature” subcategory.

(b) the central content space by specifying what categories of information they wish to appear.

(c) the right-hand actions menu – where the user can list additional content shortcuts, and specify external feeds.

The broad conceptual approach for the content area is therefore:

shortcuts / content / actions

with the content changing as the user tabs between the various slice views. Of course, since the items are all configurable, there can be a certain amount of crossover between the shortcuts and the actions – there's no reason why a user may not place an action such as “listen to latest BBC Oxford news bulletin” on one of their menus. In addition, a user may choose to use a customised CSS to reposition everything on their homepage. But that's harder to draw ;-). The configurable actions should include items linked to the user's log-in – for example “latest comments in my message board groups”.

This configurable approach allows the users to devise their own categorisation of BBC content. It does not necessarily have to be logical, or put through a focus group – it's just what that person decides is the best approach for them.

Equally, the BBC should provide sets of choices of customisations for people who do not wish to categorise the BBC's content themselves – so, for example, there could be a “science” homepage, which provides news, features, debates and multimedia content to do with science; or a “local to you” homepage collecting all information from around the BBC for the users' location – beyond what's currently provided by the WIL sites.

These categorisations should also be shareable. So anyone can adopt anyone else's homepage – which includes menu items, categories for top stories and right-hand menu action choices. Any user viewing someone else's homepage will see a “use this homepage” button. They will also see a “use this design” button, so they can use the relevant CSS without also having to adopt the customisations. Users whose homepages meet with the broad approval of other users – shown by a high adoption of their own style of homepage – could be rewarded.

Tabbing between the various slices changes the central content space. So, in the default homepage, what's show in the central content space is the LATEST info from the users' specified categories.

POPULAR tab
* The content area in this tab shows the most popular content within your categories as determined by the number of clicks on each story.
* Users can also choose to browse other popular content in their specified content categories using other determinants of popularity, including:
- most popular by most forwarded
- most popular by most favourited
- most popular by users clicking “suggest for homepage” links on each page

PICKS tab
* The picks tab maintains the BBC's role as a trusted editorial voice. It shows the BBC's own picks for homepage content from the relevant user-specified categories, plus a section of BBC-wide suggestions.
* Users can also flag up to the editorial team the pages they find within bbc.co.uk that they consider appropriate for the homepage by clicking a new “suggest 4 homepage” link provided on each page.

FAVES TAB

* Every BBC page will have a "add this to favourites" button, which will add to the user's list of BBC bookmarks.
* The "FAVES" tab will show a graphical representation of these links, sortable by category, title and date. The links will be configurable from this screen – e.g. users will be able to delete favourites they no longer want listed.

MOSEY TAB

* This tab enables users to explore the world of BBC content. They can either use the generic BBC search box, or use a tag search box that presents results in a clickable tag cloud. Hovering over a tag gives a list of matching content links; each tag has spider leg links to conceptually related tags, which the user can follow to explore along conceptual lines.

For example, a user could search for the tag "cat". A cloud is generated, showing links up the cat conceptual tree to animals, and sideways to pets, and downwards to kittens. A user can hover over the word "cat" to see matching content, or click a related concept to centre the cloud around that new concept, then hover over it to view its related content.

CONFIG tab (c.f. flickr's organize function)

* This tab gives users an intuitive drag&drop application to configure their category menus, content categories and right-hand menu choices.
* Advanced users could also upload their own CSS to be used on their homepage, which can be shared with other users.

One of the main motivations for this approach has been thinking about how to overcome the tendency for BBC content to be silod into the various departmental lines - it would be great to have a variety of views into the content - including some exploratory functions - that don't follow the categorisations imposed by the BBC. Also, I really hate sport, so I want to be able to delete any mention of sport from my BBC homepage :-).

IF I HAD THE TIME/$$

* enable users to mark other users as contacts, and view their favourites, homepage picks etc..
* do some alternative designs for the same content ... *ahem* and tidy up the existing design
* ajax it up - build a proper prototype to show the dynamic menus etc..
* build a proper amazon-style recommendation engine based on stories any user visits. Note it should also be configurable so you can specify whether you are *actually* interested in what the system guesses you might like. This would enable a user to get an auto-generated page, with menus and content representing the categories they visit most often.

• 26 May 2006 12:56