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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

…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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

3rd most visited site in Britain

2500 websites

22.5m UK unique users

17.7m International unique users

bbc.co.uk

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

Groundbreaking when launched

Functionally limited

Dated visual design

Navigation/information balance

Home page: past

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Home page: now

Inviting modern design

Searchable

Widgetized

Personizable

Accessible to all

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

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)

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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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

Customization

+ 30% of UU’s have customized their page

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

The highest form of flattery

BBC homepage is influencing media portals everywhere

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

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

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3rd party content into BBC widgets

Off-BBC widgets

Tear-off strips

Homepage: soon to come

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

Visual Language

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Visual Language

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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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

iPlayer: ubiquitous potential

Iplayer Wii

image here

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

Portable

BBC is now available on:

PC

Mac

Set-top box (red button)

iPhone

Wii

And many others…

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

Semantic Web: IP ubiquity

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

“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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

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

Metadata

Semantic Web - conflict

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bbc.co.uk/programmes

Persistence pays

Permanent, persistent URLs for every BBC

• Episode

• Series

• Brand

Programmes categorised by:

• Channel

• A-Z

• Genre

• Format

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Metadata

Automatic Programme Support

aka /Programmes

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bbc.co.uk/programmes

Automatic Programme Support

Consistent templatized designs

Widgetized elements

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Metadata

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

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 Copyright & Confidential 2008

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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

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

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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

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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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

Mobile

Other Platforms

Web

IPTV

Rapidly evolving consumption habits

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

Controversy

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

Discovery 1.0

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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

BBC Copyright & Confidential 2008

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