myBBC : online. on TV. on radio.
The idea of the page, like google's personalised homepage, is to be a portal for a user to access their whole online life, on one page.
Unlike google, the BBC has content.
Hundreds of pages, schemes, games.
As it is, BBC seems to hide very well behind its bbc.co.uk and news.bbc.co.uk front pages.
This page lets users bring their information from other parts of the bbc site, as well as other information (e.g. rss feeds from their email services) together on one page.
Perhaps more importantly, the page displays programme listings of whats happening right now, and that a user can simply press the play button, and watch live in a popup. Clicking a channel name can take the direct to a page listing the day's and the week's showings, and an RSS feed can bring the day's listings direct to the user's browser, while not being of any use to news companies, therefore meaning that the BBC can still charge for access to advance listings.
I have included a box for radio playback, as it is still a very widely used part of the BBC, and as broadband speeds increase, people might be increasingly tempted not to buy a digital radio or replacement radio hifi, but listen through their computer. For this reason, having the digital channels available on the web would also be a great addition.
As a demonstration of the integration of bbc features into the homepage, I have included a box with a user's recent moving shares in celebdaq, a massive multiplayer game where users can buy and sell virtual shares in celebrities. I have also included one point from bbc news' magazine 'ten things we didn't know this time last week', and the 'picture of the day' from the 'in pictures' page on the news site.
Another point, this whole design was made entirely using open source software, linux, firefox and the 'gimp' graphics design suite. While I'm hardly demanding that the whole of BBC switches to linux, better adoption of open standards or more OS independant media elements would nice, to aleviate the difficulty of playing windows media format videos(as are currently present)on the bbc news page, in linux. A possible solution would be to have a google-video or youtube style flash-based player.
Furthermore, the open source model could be a very neat way for extensions and feed handlers for the site to be developed, as backstage has shown, with a vast range of impressive projects being produced by hobbyists.
However, technical talk aside, what will essentially matter about a BBC homepage is the ease of use for all audiences.
My design incorporates a 'low graphics' mode (changed by tab on the top bar, a cookie could be used to remember this setting)for people who don't have the same 8mbps broadband that I am used to, and a link in the top right hand corner to increase of decrease the text size. I conjunction with proper adherence to coding standards, this could dramatically improve the accessibility of the page for people with visual impairments.
As I stated earlier, the function of the page will be similar to the google.com/ig page. There are, however, differences. My page does not allow any element to be moved in 'normal' use, as is allowed by the google page. Doing this alleviates the need to designate screen real estate for drag and drop bars. Instead, in my design, when the 'shuffle' feature is turned on, the contents of all the boxes is 'greyed out', and a 'x' appears in the top right hand corner. The remainder of the box can then be 'grabbed' by the mouse for moving around the screen. This also improves accessibility for people with arthiritic joints, by providing a larger area upon which they can click. The shuffle mode is simply turned 'off' and normal use continues.
The 'my shows' box allows, much like in the sky television menu, users to select a program for a reminder that that program is about to start. These can be set in program listings by the user, and a level of alerts could be chosen, for example, the user could be emailed, sms'd (at a cost), or have an AJAX box popup on the bbc homepage, warning them that their program is about to start, and providing a link to launch the viewer to watch the program live on their computer.
Because of the module-based nature of the page, large or important news stories could be given a 'box' that would forcibly appear on every user's personalised homepage, in addition to, or as well as the main promotion box.
Weather and local news could be set up so that a user can, in their user options, specify different locations for, say, weekdays and weekends, giving accurate information whereever users are.
As increasing numbers of email providers enable users to have an RSS feed of their mailbox, the 'my mail' box simply collates RSS feeds from all of the user's email providers, making the homepage much more useful as a page to actually set as the user's homepage, rather than 'just a page they check every couple of days'.
Every box has a 'help' and an 'options' link, both of which could pop up an ajax-style box displaying help and related options (e.g. number of news items displayed, number of emails displayed).
With time, money and a usability study, a full AJAX-based solution would likely provide an excellent page based on this design, highly dependant upon the flexibility of RSS and many links to the wealth of content available from BBC in the form of audio, text, pictures and video.
As for the title? BBC London news has been using this slogan for a while, and I feel that it accurately sums up and shows how the many services that the BBC are all linked together, and then added to the new personalised features, to form 'the BBC 2.0'.
littlegreenguy (16)
- 26 May 2006 12:56
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