The BBC’s web design system has a comprehensive menu of components that products can adopt to bring their experiences together. It gives products more flexibility and allows teams to be more efficient when delivering user value.
I led the design iteration and delivery of the Billboard, a component designed and tested to provide users with more discernible choice when browsing indexes.
There was a responsibility for delivering quickly with moving business needs and growing user, and editorial requirements.
Having already been implemented on the BBC Homepage, there was an objective to sell the benefits of the Billboard to other BBC product teams.
Midway through the project, a company-wide change in brand guidelines added additional complexities and requirements to the project.
There were hard deadlines set by senior stakeholders to deliver the Billboard in time to create impact for major moments in the editorial calendar.
I made iterations to scale and flexibly accommodate additional editorial requirements, regularly seeking out feasibility and viability constraints with product and engineering.
I led a multi-disciplinary team to design a colour system to scale the Billboard to meet pan BBC and specific product branding requirements.
I initiated a vision piece to investigate how we might want to dial up and down the visual impact of the Billboard to match the severity of the content.
I put together a Billboard pitch showcasing the impact of the Billboard, in order to sell the benefits of adopting the component for other product teams.
I participated and contributed to early BBC brand design sprints, which influenced how the new branding would be applied to existing components, including the Billboard.
Using front end knowledge, I was able to communicate to engineers in HTML, CSS and JS, leading to smooth implementation of designs that pushed the initial MVP.
Qualitative research showed that users felt that indexes with the Billboard had more varied content than without, with analytics showing a higher click through rate compared to standard article promos.
After a showcase roadshow, and along with its performance on the BBC Homepage, the Billboard was adopted by BBC Sport, BBC News, BBC Bitesize, Cbeebies and CBBC web indexes, reaching over 24 million weekly users.
Initially built for the web design system, the Billboard was tested and adapted to work cross-platform, with BBC Sport and BBC News apps building the component in Swift UI and Jetpack Compose.
The component has so far provided visual impact for huge editorial moments such as the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the War in Ukraine, commented on internally and externally for invoking more emotion due to it's visual storytelling.
Made in the North West, UK