The challenge
The challenge was here that the BBC homepage is currently a completely curated experience, with no personalisation whatsoever. But research shows that users are increasingly expecting a more relevant, personalised experience from their news and media websites.
We were challenged to design and build the technical capability for the automated curation of content from around the BBC estate, and make a completely new experience for the homepage.
How I approached it
- after mapping out and identifying key stakeholders, I led a discovery sprint with the aim of generating ideas for a new experience on the BBC homepage. The output was a series of ‘provocatypes’ that we could explore further
- I worked closely with the business analysts and information architects to explore the feasibility of some of the solutions, and map out the technical requirements in order to develop a ‘collections’ modal
- we tested an early prototype with users, with manually curated content, and received positive feedback
- by working with engineers, product and designers, we built some rudimentary capability that allowed us to run an experiment on the live homepage where we could display one collection, per day, to 5% of our users
- after that, we worked closely with the homepage curations team to generate the content for 7 ‘collections’ that we would use for the experiment
The result
This project is still ongoing, so I can’t share too much detail.
After a successful experiment and presenting back to senior leadership, we’ve moved onto building the capability that will allow us to automate the creation of collections in the future.
And we’re planning a separate experiment for sport-specific collections within the sports app.
