Herding Digital Cats - Pt 2
Or, Ten Years of Information Architecture at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳
This post is part of the tenth birthday celebrations of bbc.co.uk
The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ has two domains in use for public service content - https://www.bbc.co.uk and . It ended up that way more by accident than design. Why not, for example, https://radio1.bbc.co.uk or https://eastenders.bbc.co.uk. Or, for that matter, why not just radio1.co.uk?
Promoting everything on TV and Radio with the mantra "Bee bee cee dot co dot ukay slash whatever" implies that the site is one, rather than a collection of mini-sites. Other UK broadcasters have chosen a different path, using a selection of content or channel specific top level domains like , , and so on.
If you promote one URL - bbc.co.uk - then as a consequence you have to put something for everyone on the front door. Initial were graphic heavy, and had content areas very much classified by the departments that made them. The labels are not terribly intuitive for the user.
Looking back on it now, I have no concept of what I would actually get if I clicked the link labelled "Technical Services", and why that would be any different from the link labelled "IT" on the other side of the page.
to feature around 21 distinctive categories in the left-hand navigation, and this number stayed pretty static. Some of those categories reflected locations and topics, but some of them still primarily reflected the name of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ department who had made the pages.
This volume of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ content online grew and grew. - now under the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳i brand - had 21 primary categories with 68 sub-category links.
When design was leaked on Flickr, , who has done a lot of fantastic design work at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ over the years, .
It was the product of a lengthy and engaging design process, which was compiled into a book called The Glass Wall.
(, and it gives a great insight into how the page came about.)
The 2002 vintage still had an over-abundance of links, though, and didn't exactly get the situation under control - the categories were reduced to 12, but there were still 60 sub-category links listed.
I can't tell you how many phone calls I used to field from producers keen to see a link to their site just squeezed into the available pixels underneath their parent category. My answer was always the same - the categories were chosen following card-sorting exercises with groups of users, and I wasn't messing with them.
The problem though is almost intractable, and is summed up by some of the audience research carried out for Philip Graf's :
"The review's audience research presented some reservations about the design and ease of navigation from the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online home page. Users, other than the very inexperienced, tend to be goal orientated, seeking to find a specific service or information as quickly as possible, but members of the public found the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online homepage too cluttered and that it did not adequately serve as a guide to the rest of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online."
People want to find exactly what they want on the homepage, and everything else to them is just "clutter"; yet the page has always had to cater for everyone using it as the front door to the site, and to showcase the breadth of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s service. As ex-homepage picture editor when talking about re-designing the homepage:
"Consider how we'd handle say the World Cup, if you could have all the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ entire World Cup output at your fingertips.. Now think that at the same time Wimbledon is on, and there's a dozen other things happening like the Chelsea flower show or local elections, all of these have past and live ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ output.. and people might want all, some or none of these things in different sizes and ways, from live HD video right down to portable sized chunks. And consider that ancillary content is now being generated, so there's world cup blogs, head gardener blogs, interactive guides, player information, and a billion other things... Makes your head hurt sometimes!"
The new 2007 homepage design (still in beta) tries to address this a little by letting the users choose and drag around what is important to them. At the time of writing there's already lively feedback about the design happening on Richard Titus' post for this blog. It will be interesting to watch the reactions develop as people get used to the page.
Martin Belam is a former Senior Development Producer, New Media
Comments
Pre 1997 some were image heavy too, one
version was photshop designed and
implementation was to chop
it into chunks and make it clickable.
A simple google style page would
do the job for many users but that
leaves a lot of space and pressure to
fill it.
I did suggest that with all the domains
we own for brand protection to
make a google job out of them instead
so any people guessed would get
them to something searchable
hi martin. In the paragraph about the leaked photo and Jones' comments, you've linked to a 2001 image when I think you mean to link to this
Thanks, eyedropper. Fixed now!