Hey, I'm James

2021

To make our Sport app experience feel more personal and relevant, we were challenged with asking our remaining signed-out users to create an account or log in.

To do this, we had to understand why people had resisted up to now, as well as manage reputational and performance-related risks.

Over a six week period, we reached a sign-in rate of 97% without a drop in users or app store ratings. The remaining 3% are likely to be mostly inactive users/installs.

The learnings from this content strategy are being used around the organisation to improve sign-in experiences across the BBC.

2019

In response to the Coronavirus pandemic, Bitesize scrambled to offer online lessons that directly support the UK school curriculum.

I led on content design to shape a new user journey into something children, parents and teachers could all understand, and managed a number of reactive changes to our strategy as the nation moved in and out of lockdown.

In three weeks, we reactively created an new online experience that helped children, parents, carers and teachers navigate over 1800 lessons.

Bitesize Daily Lessons reached over 70 million views, and evolved continually as the UK moved in and out of lockdown, and schools opened and closed.

Now, the successes from Daily Lessons are used to steer Bitesize’s strategy for the future.

2020

In all of our research, users wanted a more relevant, personalised experience. While our personalised tab, MySport, lacked engagement.

We set out to improve discoverability and interaction with the MySport features, ultimately redesigning the onboarding process to prioritise favourite sport and team selection.

We improved our sign-in rate, as well as encouraging half of our new users to select a favourite sport. New users engaged more with their MySport tab than existing users.

- 71.5% optional sign-in rate
- 50.8% users selected a favourite sport
- 19.7% selected entered a favourite team

2020

The scope of this project was to a design a single, simplified solution to our many disparate and outdated commissioning tools and systems across Radio, TV and online.

It could streamline our internal processes for commissioning new shows and content, as well as make it easier and more accessible for show creators to pitch to the BBC.

Preliminary sign-off has been reached to standardise the language we use to describe the various stages of the commissioning process. And we’ve began to review and rewrite all external facing documentation on the existing, older systems.

2018

Design and develop dynamic calculators to help existing mortgage customers view mortgage products that are relevant to their situation, before applying online.

As a result, we could reduce processing time for users and colleagues.

We reduced the time it takes for a customer to switch their mortgage with the bank from two weeks to three days, and removed 40 calls/month into the bank’s contact centre.

After this, we quickly ported the calculators to the Bank’s mortgage broker-facing website: Platform.

2019

Nightfall was a Research & Development exercise for the BBC, to create the BBC’s first online multiplayer game and build the capabilities to support online gaming.

To complement the brand documentation for the BBC’s first online multiplayer game, I led the cocreation of the brand voice and tone with our editorial and design colleagues.

I also led on content for the app and web UI, Bestiary (an index of all the game’s monsters, lore and characters) and website.

Nightfall reached over 10k downloads on iOS and Android, with a Play Store rating of 4.1/5.

Comprehensive voice and tone documentation helped editorial teams to create clear, usable and entertaining content for seasonal updates two years.

In 2021, Nightfall was decommissioned. But I’ve built a strong relationship with our R&D department as a result of the project and still provide UX Writing support.