The BBC's live experience provides users with coverage of live events from the World Cup Finals and the King’s Coronation, to the UK Bowls Championships and breaking news stories.
Despite the perception of slow updates, I led the design process as our team aimed to make the experience more dynamic, tracking impact on bounce rate and user perception as measure for success.
With the squad responsible for building and maintaining both BBC Live and Sport products, there was limited resource especially with a major tech migration of BBC Sport pages.
Previously there had been no user-facing improvements in over 12 months on the Live experience, due to a different tech migration in the Live product.
Due to the limited engineering resource and other editorial priorities, the project was restricted to just exploring visual enhancements for page updates, since improving the speed or editorial workflow was out of scope.
A design trainee was part of the team, and I was responsible for setting his workload and guiding him through the product design process.
To engage the team and raise the priority of the project on the engineering roadmap, I took a collaborative approach to the project.
I worked closely with the engineering lead to understand the live infrastructure and the components that statically updated during an event.
I planned and facilitated cross-discipline collaborative workshops to dynamically enhance the existing components.
I led on the creation high-fidelity prototypes and animations, to use as stimulus for user testing and visual aids during stakeholder conversations.
I involved the whole product team in user testing with the BBC audience, with engineers and product colleagues even facilitating sessions.
After insight analysis I iterated concepts to create a compelling product proposition, which was shared with senior stakeholders.
I tailored the design trainee's workload in order for him to get the most out of the project, helping him to develop animation and prototyping skills, along with enabling experience in stakeholder management.
My collaborative approach to the project and compelling product proposition convinced the executive product manager to form a dedicated team to implement the solution.
The bounce rate on live pages reduced from 40% to 18%.
The solution was scaled and implemented across BBC Sport and BBC News live pages.
In further qualitative research, users reported a more dynamic and engaging experience, with a perception of receiving more regular updates.
The design trainee secured a junior designer position in another BBC product team, using this project as a case study.
Made in the North West, UK