BBC News App

Personalizing News to a Global Audience

After the first edition of the BBC News App in 2010, BBC News wanted to overhaul with a full redesign of the App with the following new criteria:

Surfacing all of 'Top Stories'
Personalise and follow your news topics
All of BBC News Video
Improved Reading Experience

My contribution was extensive around the visual design and the interaction design behaviour of both IOS and Android, which was exploring very new ground at the time.

I was also throughly involved in user testing and had a tight collaboration with IOS and Android developers, which contributed in a driven morale to do our best.

Team

Ben Gammon, David Man, Adil Hussein

Skills

User Research & Testing
Stakeholder Management
Product Design
App Design (IOS & Android)

My role

UX Designer, Visual and Interaction Design

Timeline

2014-2015

Background

The ambition of the News Editorial team was to find the right balance between established user behaviours and the level of discovery.

With the team I worked closely to explore the anatomy of content and therefore visual language, and ways in which we could easily move between what might be fleeting interests, as of by following the constant exposure to world changing events.

Before we got deep in build, we sketched ideas that I was then glad to rapidly prototype, either in after effects or in paper format. We were able to test a variety of them, and iterated on the insights.

Early Concepts

A rapid illustration to understand a vertical interaction behaviour; this was pitched to all senior stakeholders and met interest. It later led to the product moving towards a rollerdex as prime navigation, a direction that was tested thoroughly on IOS platforms.

The proposition however was meeting a shift in preference, with some users loving it as very innovative and refreshing, whereas conservative users showed stronger reservations.

Example 1
Behaviour animation to get started.

Example 2
Rollerdeck test with content

Example 3
Developed Rollerdeck with CTA.

User Testing

We tested the designs iteratively before making any decision. Key questions being asked in the start was to gage response on a radically new navigation based on a rollodex.

Item Page (Article/Video)

Both the article and the video page are the bread and butter of the product. The differentiation was very conscious, utilising the most reader friendly approach to a single article versus pulling out video content with a dark, to tie in with the wider visual language familiar from iplayer and video experiences.

IOS Navigation

Working closely with the IOS developers I guided the visual design as well as the nature of the motion design.

The logic to include a secondary navigation, included getting a very high at a glance view of 'My News' as well as giving intuitive access to settings, as not to clutter the rest of the nav.

Global launch

The BBC News App went live in January 2015 for both Android & iOS in a global launch, and has per BBC stats reported to be downloaded at the time 27 Million times.

The BBC wrote this article to tell the story why the redesign was important.