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BBC website: experiments in convergence

It hasn’t exactly crept up on me. I was aware of the BBC plans, as I was working on a similar design build at my last editorial management job. Ajax technology, the dashboard, coverging media, putting the user in control as the philosophy behind the new careers site, Creative Choices. But now the BBC changes are here, like a number of other people (and not all of us are naturally averse to change) I’m very unsure. No, I’m clear. It’s the turning back of the clock… the ‘room to breathe’…

I’m not talking about summer. As one of the most popular sites in the UK, a large percentage of the online audience will have noticed, and had a reaction to, the BBC’s new design. Reading the Sports Editor’s blog on how the changes have filtered down to BBC Sport the revamp is explained as a need to maintain pace with convergence:

Much of the talk in media and technology circles is around convergence, with the boundaries between radio, TV and new media blurring all the time. Audiences are entitled, and increasingly expect, to get the best mix of words, still images, moving pictures, audio and interactivity in one place, on a single platform.

 

That’s what we need to be able to offer our users, which means updating both the look and feel and the functionality of bbc.co.uk/sport.

This makes sense for a big hitter as the BBC, and you can see the importance to the corporation of adaptation.

The Sports Editor has also done a welcome chronological montage of the major site changes over the last eight years, from yellow back pages and Web1.0 right bang up to date with new technologies such as AJAX for its drag’n'drop homepage dashboard, reminiscent of netvibes.com and iGoogle. The problems as I see them are…

1. Less (content) is not more (content).
The Sports Editor’s argument that a widening of the page from 800 to 1024 pixels to give more prominence to audio, video and feature content is a fair one–if there’s more content. But there seems to be a lot less, specifically, as some of the comments on the BBC site point out, for minority sports. The Editor also points out that there will be no more ‘red ribbon releases’, meaning that the BBC site will now develop (and improve) iteratively. It needs to, and first has to be upping the level of its content across its sports coverage, in any format, text, audio or video.

2. No finesse.
It’s not netvibes. The site has not used its real-estate well, and if the idea of giving content ‘room to breathe’ means doubling your leading and bloating your masthead banner then I think the BBC has got its convergence argument wrong. While I think, yeah, good on them and other large insitutions for using new technology to provide the user with more control (Athens, for example, who have just introduced AJAX onto their homepage dashboards for academics who are research-active) it is this aspect of convergence - participation and ownership - that is of critical importance to usability and the application of new technology, more than trying to put mobile next to text in a Firefox browser. When I choose to browse with a PC- or Macbook based web-browser, I want minimal fuss, good tight use of space, and ownership over and participation in my screen. And on my mobile, the same. I don’t want a mobile screen on my PC, thanks.

3. The masthead.
Ugh. Agh. I feel like I’ve been forced to watch a club-handed card sorting exercise, with elements thrown down on a page at random. No symmetry or balance. And no consistency across pages (e.g. from homepage to blog pages). More on the issue of finesse, but any sure-eyed designer would prioritise these details in the first iteration.

4. The move to advertising.
Hands up who believes we won’t see advertising on the UK BBC site within three years? Point four of the editor’s justification for the new design is incorporating adverts more successfully for international users. I think this has a big part to play in the redesign. It’s not necessarily a criticism either, as advertising is media and an important form, and the BBC charter was written in 1927, which means they should be moving to a new model, and online will trial that first, no doubt. But without the ads in place on the UK-site, we can’t see how well this site works.

More changes to come, they promise. Let’s see if they’re backwards or forwards.

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