- Organisation
- BBC
- Year
- 2022
- In a word
- Experimentation
The challenge
The BBC homepage was entirely curated by hand, with no personalisation at all. But research showed people increasingly expected news and media sites to feel relevant to them.
We were challenged to design and build the technical capability to automatically bring together content from across the BBC, and use it to create a completely new experience on the homepage.
My contribution
- Starting with ideas: after mapping out the key stakeholders, I led a discovery sprint to generate ideas for the homepage. The output was a set of "provocatypes" we could explore further.
- Making it feasible: I worked with business analysts and information architects to test the feasibility of the ideas and map the technical requirements for a "collections" module.
- Testing early: we tested an early prototype with manually curated content, and users responded positively.
- Going live: working with engineers, product and designers, we built enough capability to run an experiment on the live homepage, showing one collection a day to 5% of users. I worked with the homepage curation team to create the 7 collections we used.
The outcome
The experiment was a success, and after presenting it back to senior leadership, the next step was to build the capability to create collections automatically, with a separate experiment planned for sport-specific collections in the BBC Sport app.
In the end, neither went on to ship. But the experiment gave the team real evidence about personalising a homepage that had only ever been curated by hand, and we took what we learned with us.