The BBC’s live experience provides coverage for breaking news stories, and major live events throughout the sporting calendar. The cross product service has always been rendered out as a web-wrapped page on the BBC News and Sport apps.
I co-led a discovery project that investigated optimising live pages for an app experience by leveraging native components and capabilities.
BBC Live is a dedicated web team, which had never really prioritised a native app experience. The current service was optimised for web, which provided a very limited experience for app users.
Collaboration between Live web, Sport app and News app product teams at the time was limited, with separate roadmaps across platforms.
The Live web team were exploring how to evolve the Live offering on web, in parallel to the app conversations around a native experience.
Research showed there was an expectation for app users to be able to seamlessly dip in and out of live pages and other content, a user need that the web experience couldn't meet.
As the News app lead designer, I initiated the collaboration with the Sport app team, and led conversations and design sprints to align on a cross-platform approach, in order to keep up with and have influence on the evolving designs on Live web.
I collaborated with the lead designer from the Sport app, pairing day-to-day on translating live web features to native components, regularly sharing with engineering and delivery teams to understand the complexities involved in potential implementation.
I co-briefed a research agency to gather insights from Sport and News app users. I also co-created advanced prototypes as stimulus for both research purposes and for regularly sharing progress with key stakeholders.
Based on the research insights, I co-led the iteration of the prototypes, packaging the designs into a product proposition with the objective of influencing the product roadmap.
Research insights indicated that along with making the live experience feel more appropriate for the app, the solutions that were tested may also meet unmet user needs like being able to dip in and out of live events.
The discovery project forced senior product managers to think about how this native live experience could become a viable feature for the apps, which sparked conversations between teams to align on product roadmaps.
The conversations and design sprints with the Live web team resulted in an evolution of the web experience that is heavy influenced and aligned with cross-platform problem solving.
It was determined that in order to build and maintain a native Live experience, it required additional engineering resource. Senior BBC stakeholders have included this project as a case study for a holistic Live vision, which aims to secure funding to build out this proposition.
Made in the North West, UK