With a vast array of genres, the BBC has the huge challenge of surfacing relevant and timely content to it’s online user-base. As part of the content discovery team, my role was to help solve this problem; allowing users to find new and exciting content that they might have previously missed.
I helped to improve a variety of services: from iterating responsive search, to early ideation of a content aggregation app and solving cross-linking in the global BBC footer.
The BBC wanted to introduce a common pattern for consuming, sharing and favoriting snackable content. To achieve this, I collaborated with more than 15 designers across multiple teams; contributing to a new Card component. This involved exploring card microinteractions, responsive flexing and visual design variants.
Using this component, i looked at how we might drive onward journeys and better cross-link services via the Global BBC footer. I artworked up different versions which were then implemented and multivariate tested. The variant that got the highest click-throughs is the version that is currently live on the BBC site and has since increased the amount of new content consumed across the BBC.
I created High-fidelity prototypes of the card concepts that helped visualise and garner buy-in from stakeholders.These were usability tested with 10 participants in the context of BBC search and iterated upon.
The developer’s prefered process was to work from design markup, so i created guidelines for them to build from. After they had done a first pass at building my designs; i worked closely with them to make sure that the final build was as polished as it could be.
Once the card component was signed off, we rolled it out pan-BBC. I specifically looked at how they might work within a carousel pattern on BBC search; whilst others looked at how they would work on the homepage, food, sport sites etc. The cards work both responsively and adaptively: For example, at desktop size, they have a hover synopsis state and on mobile devices, an accordion push-up state is displayed.
With over a million weekly searches, 19% of them being for TV or Radio, we received a large amount of positive feedback on the new card pattern.