A service that enables BBC to create a truly personal relationship with our audiences
My role was as a UX designer Responsibility for IA, Design look and feel, UX, User testing (in collaboration with UX researcher), stakeholder engagement for visual and technological design, accessibility expert
The project
BBC account comprises of completely new, welcoming, straightforward sign in, registration and profile settings.
BBC account key facts
20+ million accounts
12 million active signed in users per month
Horizontal project effecting all BBC online products
Website project complexity
10 + different products within the BBC (e.g iPlayer, sport, news etc) all reliant on IDv5 to enable personalised features within their respective products
Over 16 million had an old IDv4 account
Target of 16 million to be signed back in to a V5 account before March 2017
Short release period (after olympics but before ‘Strictly Come Dancing’) so the product is not at risk
Marketing requirements – Postcode data collection
Stakeholders from all different teams wanting input and alignment with products
Consistency with GEL (global experience language)
The team was set up as three separate team; The backend team, the front-end team and the transitions (between old and new). As as UX team we were heavily engrained into the front-end team. I was keen to have no divides between disciplines, so working daily with Dev or QA or Product was key.
The Brief
The BBC is a large and complex organisation. We serve 308 million households worldwide and 64.1 million people in the UK alone. 65% of our audience uses our digital services and 35 million unique browsers access them every day. Creating value for these audiences means getting the right content and information to the right person at the right moment.
The vision for the future of the BBC was set out by Tony Hall back in March 2015, this included as a top priority making the audiences experience online more personal. To do this, we need the audience to sign in to an account so that we can better understand our users. The problem is, the old identity platform used to sign in was unstable and not scaleable to the demand of some of the new features products wanted to introduce.
Discover stage – Initial ideas
We held group wireframing co creation sessions to enable the whole team (including developers, project managers, BA’s etc) to input into the beginning stages of the work. It helped iron out any grey areas when it came to design and allowed us to design solutions which were achievable.
This didn’t mean we couldn’t think outside the box – I often challenged the developers and they equally challenged me. It was a healthy and productive way of working. We used the wireframes to help create and flesh out user journeys, taken from user stories based on our personas.
Research
Internal and external quantitive and qualitative research.
Once we had user stories, wireframes ready to go we designed and built interactive prototypes to test with users. We tested them with real people who matched our personas. We ran many lab based and more informal on site testing sessions. Our UX researcher ran these and I was involved in preparing goals for the sessions, prototypes, listening to and implementing relevant feedback.
Prototyping and testing
Once we had user stories, wireframes ready to go we designed and built interactive prototypes to test with users. We ran lab based and more informal guerrilla testing sessions. Our UX researcher ran these and I was involved in preparing goals for the sessions, prototypes, listening to and implementing relevant feedback.
A contextual experience
From a visual experience and point of view we had to find the right balance in between communicating around BBC account being single account for all BBC products, and at the same time providing a tailor made experience adapted to each individual.
In order to achieve this we focused our effort in contextualising the experience, using strong themed background images. For example, an iPlayer user registering would see Claudia Winkleman or Graham Norton. A CBBC user signing in would see Radzi Chinyanganya (Blue Peter presenter) or the characters from Sarah & Duck.
Design Iteration and live site
Once the final tests had been done and analysed, the design iterations were made and designs passed to development to be built. The first iteration of the design was for Strictly Come Dancing 2016, the BBC’s most watched program, where a live vote happens that relies on users to sign in to vote. We pushed the BBC account live for the show on time, which in itself was a huge success – and big step forward for the organisation.
We immediately had feedback from our users and our team were in the position to not only fix bugs or issues found, but learn from the analytics gathered and work to improve the experience for users going forward.
