transforming the user experience of the bbc

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

Richard TitusController, User Experience & Design

Unlocking the BBC’s universe of content and services


Fulfilling our public service remit

Rapidly changing media consumption habits

Growing popularity of non-linear platforms

Need to satisfy diverse audience of 40m+ UU’s

Challenge

…taking the BBC from trusted and traditional


…to trusted and future facing

BBC Online is driving a new dynamic

Broadcasting means something different in the age of IP connectivity

Integral to market prominence in era of broadband and social networking

Dynamically-generated pages allow us to better organize and showcase our content

“Playground effect” extending value to existing content


3rd most visited site in Britain

2500 websites

22.5m UK unique users

17.7m International unique users

bbc.co.uk


Groundbreaking when launched

Functionally limited

Dated visual design

Navigation/information balance

Home page: past


Home page: now

Inviting modern design

Searchable

Widgetized

Personizable

Accessible to all


Giving audiences exactly what they want

Top user destinations from the Homepage

News (1.90m)

Local Weather (1.29m)

Sport (1.16m)

Football (651,656)

5-day Weather forecast (317,973)


Widgetization

Content atomized into a feed-based universe

Software more flexible, cost efficient and re-usable

Browsers and devices lenses to consume and tailor content


Customization

+ 30% of UU’s have customized their page


Most Added & Opened Most Deleted & Minimised

News 7,563,588 CBBC 771,809

Sport 7,313,6555 News 127,630

Blogs 6,183,401 Sport 111,301

Giving audiences exactly what they want


The highest form of flattery

BBC homepage is influencing media portals everywhere


Homepage: soon to come

User feedback has indicated a desire for external widgets

Ongoing discussion with editorial team to evolve compelling proposition

Inspiration – Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle, iYahoo, facebook


3rd party content into BBC widgets

Off-BBC widgets

Tear-off strips

Homepage: soon to come


Visual Language


Visual Language

Mobile Service

Consistent with visual language

Preparing for Customization

Mobile service success metrics

Text-based service launched 1999

Redesign March 2008

UU’s per month up 6% to 2.9m since refresh

Huge news & sport hungry audience

Challenge to unite editorial and technical staff


iPlayer: leading the world

New iPlayer homepage

Consistent with visual language

Preparing for widgetization

iPlayer success metrics

Average time spent 22min

90m programmes watched since launch

“Playground effect” adding value to existing BBC content


iPlayer: ubiquitous potential

Iplayer Wii

image here


Portable

BBC is now available on:

PC

Mac

Set-top box (red button)

iPhone

Wii

And many others…


Semantic Web: IP ubiquity


“The Lesson of web 2.0 is to leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.

Tim O’Reily

Imag

e so

urce

:

Data


XML customised tags, like:<dog>Nena</dog>

+ RDF relations, in triples, like:(Nena) (is_dog_of) (Kimiko/Stefan)

+ Ontologies / hierarchies of concepts, like:mammal -> canine -> Cotton de Tulear -> Nena

+ Inference rules like:If (person) (owns) (dog), then (person) (cares_for) (dog)

= Semantic Web

For dummies…

Semantic Web


Standardization Inaccuracy for chaosOrganic evolution (crowd source)Technology will solve (Google)

Metadata

Semantic Web - conflict


bbc.co.uk/programmes

Persistence pays

Permanent, persistent URLs for every BBC

• Episode

• Series

• Brand

Programmes categorised by:

• Channel

• A-Z

• Genre

• Format


Metadata

Automatic Programme Support

aka /Programmes


bbc.co.uk/programmes

Automatic Programme Support

Consistent templatized designs

Widgetized elements


Metadata


bbc.co.uk/music

Semantic notes

Permanent, persistent URLs

MusicBrainz provides unique ID

- artists, albums, tracks etc.

Integrate with tracklistings on

programme episode pages


bbc.co.uk/music

Mashing it up

URLs designed to be Restful and expose our domain model

Persistent identifiers for our editorial objects makes it easier to mash the systems together

Automatically link from an episode tracklisting > artist page > other performances


Topic pages: navigating the content jungle

Hard to find latest most relevant BBC content about a topic

Users had to navigate a plethora of sites and information

Manual updating resulted in duplicate and out-of-date information


Topic pages

Extracting the BBC’s finest Google juice

Feeds of latest BBC content

Automatically updated pages

Each covers a person, country or subject

Editors can add hand-picked features


How we choose the topics

What people are looking for

What we have content about

BBC editorial priorities

Topic pages: how do they work?

Feeds are then created from…

News including video

Programmes on iPlayer

Weather forecasts

Country profiles

TV & Radio schedules


How the BBC Page Assembly Layer works

Receives request and looks up modules

Extracts them from various BBC systems

Assembles modules and returns page to user

Data structure is based on the Atom format

XSLT is used to transform the XML to XHTML

Topic pages: dynamically generated


Mobile

Other Platforms

Web

IPTV

Rapidly evolving consumption habits


Controversy

Is Search the navigation solution of last result ? Or is it core element of web 3.0?

Discovery 1.0


Merger of technology and human editorial

Better data => better results (personalized often invisibly)

Social book marking used to refine results and change ranking.

Inaccuracy cured though crowd sourcing

Snapshots (search one thing) idea that there will be NO clicking from search to result.

Semantic Web + People

Future of search


“The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” William Gibson

transforming the user experience of the bbc

Design

existing bbc content

widgetization content

existing content

homepage news

portable bbc

tailor content

rdparty content

content playground effect