Nearly three years ago, Jennie Baird, chief product officer of BBC Studios, was tasked with helping to lead a complete overhaul of BBC.com, the organization’s global news site and app. The publisher, which Baird described as existing “like oxygen” for its U.K. audience, wanted to cultivate greater stronger global consumption of its brand as it faced stronger economic headwinds at home.
BBC Studios is the global, commercial arm of the public broadcaster and a key vehicle for revenue generation amid its ever-tightening, publicly funded U.K. budget via a national TV license fee. “The goal for BBC Studios is to be able to contribute back commercial returns that can offset any potential future loss in public funding or reduction in public funding,” Baird said.
The problem: The face BBC was presenting to global news consumers was, as they say in the U.K., something of a dog’s breakfast at the time. BBC.com was overrun with visual clutter. Ads jumped on top of ads that already sat atop text content, video or navigation buttons.
“Every single piece of code that you’re putting on that page is competing with another piece of code that you’re putting on that page and is making your site slower,” Baird said. “Being slow is the worst thing you can be on the internet, for your consumer but also for your discovery engines like Google. Then, when you have the visual clutter, people sort of have ad blindness and they’re just scanning for where there’s content.”
Her solution to the “very scary” looking code dumps in the back end of BBC.com that manifested a dizzying user experience was, in hindsight, a simple one, though not easy to sell: less code, fewer ads. Pointing to a screenshot of BBC.com’s current iteration, on display during a keynote conversation with TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp at NewsTechForum on Tuesday, Baird noted there’s only ever one full ad in view.
“The idea,” she said, “was that it would create a premium feel, but also allow users to actually pay attention to the ads and say, ‘This is what you should focus on. Here’s a great piece of content, and here’s a great advertiser that is supporting this content.’”
Baird discussed this strategy and other approaches to optimizing news websites and shooing them away from many of the bad design habits they’ve picked up over the years.
Streamline Experiences For Site Users And Back End Managers
Baird observed that consumers today are often “bumping into” their news. In other words, they are unsure of their sources when engaging with news after coming across it, primarily on social media and other aggregators. That’s a problem for the BBC, or any news company, that wants to create habituation from consumers. Return business will only be secured through brand recognition.
When Baird began her overhaul of BBC.com, she said the company had around seven websites that had strung together with an overarching navigation. The sites were disconnected from a data standpoint, she said, “so they looked differently, they operated differently, and in the back end, we didn’t even have a shared cookie across them.”
The company didn’t know if a consumer arrived at one site for a news story and then found themselves in a business story or in an innovation and technology story, rendering them “a complete anonymous stranger” to the BBC. This wasn’t good for all the reasons the BBC wanted to know who its users were, Baird said, “either for building better profiles, for advertising or building up trusted relationships and personalization for those users.”
The experience was disjointed, for users and back-end managers. And so, her small team built a new CMS from scratch, using WordPress.
“The idea was to bring things together in a modular, Lego bricks kind of way,” Baird said.
The result is a much more straightforward BBC.com homepage, organized with broad verticals at the top and subcategories only revealed once a relevant vertical’s page is opened.
Go Live, Even With Text
At the top right of the BBC.com homepage sits a blinking red button with black text that says “Watch Live.” Click on that and a livestream of BBC News begins playing. Beneath the player window, are “Top news” articles, “More news” and a string of the day’s “Latest updates.”
But for the text-minded consumer, there’s another “Live” button placed at the end of the site’s categories. Click on that and a series of links to live event coverage vertically fill the screen. Entering one of the story pages, on the left there’s a summary of what’s gone on so far, next to “Live reporting,” which is a series of centrally aligned short text updates that arrive periodically.
“One of the innovations that we did on this new site of BBC.com.” Baird said, “was we created a live page where we would aggregate all of those live experiences, because live pages are kind of ephemeral”. If a user arrives late to a story, she explained, in the past they may have missed it completely. With the site laid out as economically as it is now, there’s less of a chance of that.
“For global news organization like us, something live may have happened while you were asleep,” she said, “so we created this live aggregator page so that you could see all the things that were live, whether they’re live now or maybe they were live while you were still asleep, or it was yesterday, and you just happened to miss that story.”
Down the road, Baird said she envisions technology advancing to the point where readers can “subscribe to upcoming live events,” and have reminders of the event delivered to them directly, nudging them in the direction of the event coverage on the site.
Building Big With Less
Depp noted that Baird executed the site redesign with “two small teams evenly distributed in New York and London.” He asked how she pulled it off and what newsrooms with limited resources can do to foster similar results on their digital platforms.
“I’m a person with a vision,” Baird said. “Articulating and selling that vision is incredibly important, so we spent a lot of time prototyping, shopping the vision, getting everybody on board, because it was not going to be just our small team who was going to get this done. We needed everybody in the organization to believe that they were part of this and that they would contribute their piece, and they would not block any other pieces — which is the other thing that happens in bigger organizations, and actually in smaller organizations, too, where somebody’s like, ‘Oh, but I own that little widget. You can’t change it.’”
On a more tangible level, Baird said they worked in Agile Methodology, as opposed to Waterfall. They outsourced some work to agencies who simply know what they’re doing when it comes to particular jobs.
Perhaps more importantly, Baird and her team were not afraid to be imperfect, and learned from the instances in which they fell short of expectations. “When was good enough good enough?” she asked herself in the process. And though she admitted to “rethinking” this approach as a hard-and-fast rule, she also adopted a disposition that “easier beats better.”
“Working with something like WordPress for your CMS, it works out of the box,” she said. “You have access to open source plugins and components that you can customize for yourself. So, there’s a lot of ways that you can shortcut and scale a small team cost effectively.”
Inching Towards Success
Nearly a year since the major work of the site’s revamp was completed, Baird said progress is being made towards creating the habitual users BBC seeks.
“We’re really moving toward increasing our weekly habitual users, as opposed to our daily or monthly users,” Baird said. “We’re doing that because of, obviously, seven-day cookie deprecation, and so we want to make sure that we can preserve the identity of that user, but also because we want to be valuable to people, that they would come here every week.”
The group has also focused on getting consumers to register with the site, for accounts, newsletters and notifications.
“All of us as independent publishers need to have a first-party relationship with our users,” Baird said. “We need to have that because we need to be able to serve them content that’s relevant to them, experiences that’s relevant to them. We need to be able to market to them, in a very focused way, our products and services that are relevant to them, and then to be able to own our own destiny in terms of advertising and premium advertising.”
