The New BBC Homepage
Filed under: Agency, Customer Engagement, Design/Creative, Useability
A little creative thought for a Monday morning.
As per my usual routine of coffee and a quick update on the weekends events, my chrome address bar is pointed at the BBC homepage. As ever, it knows who I am and why I have returned. I can browse the results from the rugby while skipping across the latest Science and Nature discoveries, all because like an old friend it knows what I like to talk about… but whats this… “Explore the new BBC homepage”. Oh dear, I have seen this all before, just when you are happy they want to change it.
“Try out our new homepage design”
Navigating through to the new design, I am immediately hit with the volume of content, everything from CBB’ies to the latest Eastender catchup. The page is headed by a large horizontally scrolling wealth of content, you will find all that the BBC has to offer with a quick left to right. Different size images give different weight to different content articles. It definitely looks clean and crisp but where is all the content that I know and love? It tells me I am in London, and that the weather that I can already see outside my window is slightly overcast, but other than that I could be anyone.
In short it would seem the BBC are following their own strategic ambitions of what content I find… not my ambitions. The BBC Homepage currently enjoys the accolade of “Most referenced site” when anyone wants to build their own company site. I fear they will loose this altogether if the beta site becomes a reality.
Any customer facing interaction point should be striving more and more to the utopian “one-to-one” conversation theory, you know who they are, and they know exactly who you are. It would seem the BBC are stepping in quite the oposite direction, as will I… iGoogle here I come.
Check out the BBC beta homepage at http://beta.bbc.co.uk/
Useable Design: Nature vs Nurture
In the ever evolving world of interactive design, delivering solutions that are relevant, engaging and visually pleasing comes second to delivering something that is usable. In order to do this you have to consider the task that is being asked of the user, and say “what is the most intuitive way I can answer this question?”.
You can appeal to the two ways a user answers a problem, understanding through “Nature” and “Nurture”. Nature: what is natural for us to do without thinking, and Nurture: what we have learnt and expect to do, based on our experiences.
Defining a process through a creative journey can be done in many different ways, many prefer to take the “Nurture” root as this is in effect looking at what has been done previously to answer the same question, and adapting that, often even taking the same creative base style, you will see many re-worked versions of Microsoft products as people believe due to their market penetration they must be doing it right, but are they?
The Nature approach is more for the fearless and brave hearted designer. Take a question, and design the answer how you believe it should work, don’t ask what the user want as they have a preconceived idea based on their experiences… which may not be the right answer, just the one they know. If the design is truly intuitive the answer will be found through natural investigation, and who knows your answer my start to set people’s expectations.
Both methods are valid in their own right, but the outcome should be the same… “this is really easy to use”.