My Design
In this entry I've tried to do the following things:-
1) Keep a clean, simple interface which still retains elements of the BBC's strong and colourful individual service brandings.
2) Bring as much heavily used information to the home page as possible without "going off at a tangent". (May or may not have succeeded there!)
3) Show the possible appearance of Web 2.0 elements such as e-mail, dynamic bookmarking and information sharing.
I've frozen and optimised the page design for a (sometimes typical) 800 x 600 resolution and I appreciate that this may not be popular. There is no reason however why a design such as this couldn't resize itself using CSS table elements.
I've expanded the search section down the right hand side of the page to allow users to narrow down the types of material that they wish to look for. There's a danger with any approach such as this of over-complicating the search function from the point of view of the user. Simple search mechanims on the web which allow people to optionally refine their results after they have made initial successful searches remain very popular and rightly so.
The 'my bbc.co.uk' and 'bbc friends' sections are just examples of the way in which interactivity may be achieved. There will no doubt be many countless other ways which spring to mind to both users and designers. The 'my location' section is a slight development on the existing 'where i live' approach and clusters quick links to regional television and radio pages, together with a summary weather forecast for the selected location.
The 'bbc random picks' section is presented as a way of rotating part of the home page content to highlight other parts of the vast array of online services, in a graphical way. The 'last 7 days highlights section' is just an idea which may be of merit to help people who may be coming to the site either regularly looking for updates or visiting to find an item within the first view days after coming across it in other media such as radio, television or the press.
A criticism which could be levelled at the main central section of the page is that some people may find the large numbers of graphical elements give the page a cluttered appearance or worse still make it hard to scan in order to find relevant links. I hope this won't be the case but this design could be varied so that different tv and radio services receive priority emphasis on different days of the week. This is employed in parts of the BBC online experience at the moment where graphic elements play a large part.
The 'more' section towards the bottom of the page represents the opportunity to rotate different 'hot topics' if these are needed as well as subjects which are likely to be there for a longer period.
I look forward to reading your feedback - Good, bad and indifferent!
- 24 May 2006 17:27
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