As one of the market leaders with 8 million weekly users, the BBC News app has been a go-to source for major news stories, including the Coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
As one of six designers, I led the design process for on-product messaging, while representing the UX discipline in stakeholder conversations for external marketing and internal communications for the app's relaunch.
The new app experience uses design system components on an updated tech infrastructure, which was required to support an upgrade on editorial curation and content creation tools.
With a high staff turnover in the team, the strategy for the app had changed direction twice within 18 months, leading to a complete project restart and rebuild.
There was no quantitative data or qualitative research on the existing messaging in the previous app to inform initial exploration.
The messaging of the app relaunch required the collaboration between multiple stakeholders from Product, Marketing and Editorial teams. With that came the challenge of aligning on direction.
There was an accelerated hard deadline for the launch of the new app, due to the requirement to support the new editorial tooling. As a result, there was very limited scope for the app MVP, with even some hygiene features from the previous experience out of scope.
I briefed and liaised with a dedicated research agency to understand the user expectation when being introduced to a new experience or new features, in order to optimise the on-product user journey and format of messaging.
I closely collaborated with the product and engineering team to gather requirements and deliver recommendations for the on-product messaging, including a reprompt for users to allow notifications.
I worked with a content designer to create a messaging framework, with the foresight of needing to scale for future app features and updates.
I managed conversations with product, marketing and editorial departments, regularly sharing project developments. I also shared the messaging framework, which heavily influenced the consistent copy across all marketing communications.
I led the motion design for internal comms material, working with senior stakeholders to storyboard, direct and produce a minute-long reel for all BBC staff.
A frustrating project with an MVP missing critical features. Although the initial response in the app reviews was negative, the project was a good example of personal development through resilience.
The experience rolled out to over 8 million users across iOS and Android platforms, which saw a 19% uplift of notifications being turned on.
The qualitative research reported that although participants usually skipped the initial onboarding on other apps, the News app messaging format was quick to inform, with the guiding animation seen as highly engaging.
External marketing was distributed in conjunction with app launch, with the internal comms material shared with all BBC staff, and presented directly to the Director General.
Made in the North West, UK