Project Description
? BBC iPlayer Radio & Music
The project
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The goal was to modernise the audio offering of the BBC. Bringing in a new younger target audience. With personalisation a key part of the offering.
Product vision. ‘There’s always something I really want to listen to waiting for me when I visit that page’
BBC iPlayer Radio / Music key facts
- Over 2.7 million monthly visits
- 45 live radio stations, over 200k on-demand audio episodes
Website project complexity
- Combination of speech and music content in one product
- Complex legacy site hierarchy and data structure
- Legacy site branding with new branding commissioned
- Multiple stakeholders
- Integration with new open API
My role
UX designer
Acting lead for work-streams within for ‘discover’ UX – Which included responsibility for Design look and feel, UX, User testing (in collaboration with UX researcher), stakeholder engagement for visual and technological design, accessibility expert
The team was set up as three separate team; The discover team, the play team and the backend API team. As as UX team we were heavily engrained into the front-end team of ‘discover. The discover team has 6 UX designers on, I was acting lead for 1 Mid weight and 2 Junior UX designers
To view the MVP visit the above URL and make sure you are Signed In to your BBC account.
The Brief
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The best of BBC iPlayer Radio and BBC Music, combined into one audio focussed personalised product.
Discover stage – Initial ideas
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I co-ran a series of 3 design sprints over 3 weeks to help engage the organisation with the project. These design sprints focused on:
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Week 1 – A Personalised landing space
User Need – How might we create an offer that’s fits a user’s routine, mood or desire to be up to date, to encourage frequent visits?
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Week 2 – Speech & music
Content Discovery – How might we present personalised recommendations and editorial content, to encourage frequent visits?
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Week 3 – ‘Light & lapsing’ audience
New Users – How might we familiarise users with what we can offer them, and find out their personal taste and interests?
The sprint structure is a slightly modified version of google’s design sprint kit.
Research
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We conducted research on our target user.
- 6 participants each day
- Objective driven script
- Testing journeys or low-fi prototypes
- Rapid analysis of research findings
- Deliver stakeholder report each week.
- End of sprint presentation to stakeholders and whole team
Wireframing and sketching journeys
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We held group wireframing sessions to enable the whole team (including developers, project managers, sys admin etc) to input into the beginning stages of the work. It helped iron out any grey areas when it came to design and allowed us to design solutions which were achievable for the MVP and future releases. This didn’t mean we couldn’t think outside the box – I often challenged the developers and they equally challenged me. It was a healthy and productive way of working.
Prototyping and testing
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Once we had user stories, wireframes ready to go we designed and built interactive prototypes to test with users. We tested them with real people who matched our persona. We ran lab based and more informal on site testing sessions. Our UX reseacher ran these and I was involved in preparing goals for the sessions, prototypes, listening to and implementing relevant feedback.
Design Iteration and live site
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Once the tests had been done and analysed, the design iterations were made and designs passed to development to be built. The first iteration of the new design was a MVT of the old homepage and the new MVP homepage.
