My latest brief is set by the D&AD through Brighton University.
The Design and Art Direction is a registered educational charity that aims to represent ‘the global creative, design and advertising communities’, by encouraging growth and development inthese areas.
(Source from brief introduction).
I’ve been looking forward to this brief since the start of the course. I originally heard about the D&AD through a friend of mine, as he took part last year whilst in his final year of Graphic Communication at Hereford College of Arts.
After reading through the list of briefs set by the D&AD it was a fairly obvious choice which one was most suitable for myself, bearing in mind my experience and strong points.
My brief of choice is set by Steve Gibbons the Design Team Leader within the User Experience and Design team, BBC. After a quick Google search I found out that Steve also helped set the D&AD BBC brief last year.
The brief:
Create a social and sharing aspect to BBC iPlayer allowing users to discover and engage with a greater range of BBC content.
There’s a few parts of the brief I want to highlight out. It’s important that the following are taken heavily into consideration whilst working on this brief.
- We are not trying to make BBC iPlayer into a social networking site
- The target audience for the BBC iPlayer is very broad
- You will need to communicate clearly the story of how the user interacts with your design
- Your primary objective is to design a web based solution
- BBC iPlayer is a cross platform proposition including IPTV and mobile
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
First of all im going to get started with some background research on the BBC. The BBC as mentioned in the above title stands for the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC is the longest established and largest broadcaster in the world, which started in 1927 (Source). It’s mission is to enrich people’s lives with programmes that inform, educate and entertain. The BBC is funded by the license fee that is paid by UK households. (As mentioned in the brief).
The BBC provide services to 8 national TV channels including regional programming, also 10 national radio stations and 40 local radio stations along with a website that is updated frequently with the latest news and more.
The BBC iPlayer launched publicly on the 25th December 2007. It was developed by the BBC to further extend it’s other streamed content through the Real Player based ‘Radio Player’ (Source).
BBC iPlayer is our service that lets you catch up with radio and television programmes from the past week.(Source).
iPlayer lets users access and watch BBC programmes through desktop and mobile devices. The service currently has 5 million visitors per month (Source from brief).
Erik Huggers, Director, BBC Future Media & Technology, said: “Since it launched at the end of last year, BBC iPlayer programmes have been available for streaming on Windows, Mac and Linux computers.
“Today, we’re pleased to display our commitment to providing a cross-platform download solution for BBC iPlayer users, as Mac and Linux users are now able to download BBC iPlayer programmes to play offline.”
Jim Guerard, Vice President and General Manager of Dynamic Media at Adobe, said: “The BBC is recognized worldwide as a trusted broadcast innovator.
“The BBC iPlayer Desktop beta on Adobe AIR will help extend their popular browser-based Web video broadcasts to more viewers with a high-quality, instant-on Internet TV experience outside the browser and across all major operating systems.” (Source).
iPlayer technical specs
The success of the iPlayer is probably due to it running multiple platforms. It currently runs on the following:
- Windows XP/ Vista/ 7
- Mac OSX
- Linux
Via a web browser or the BBC iPlayer Desktop application. Requiring the following technologies:
Adobe Air and Adobe Flash
- iPhone and iPod touch Beta
- Symbian S60 (beta)
- Wii (beta)
- Virgin Media (Steaming Only)
- Playstation 3 (Beta)
- Languages
In: English, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic
The anatomy of the iPlayer (website format)
Requirements: Internet Connection
Requirements: Adobe Flash
In order to properly understand how something functions, its important to dissect and reverse engineer the subject. This is something I learnt during my second year at Bath Spa University. It was through a project, which was to reverse engineer a chosen piece of software.
The anatomy of the iPlayer is well structured. I’ve highlighted the homepage’s architecture starting with the top, finishing at the bottom. I will discuss each part that is highlighted below:
1) The header (The top and first part of a websites structure) of the BBC iPlayer homepage greets you with the BBC ident. It Lets the user familiarize their self with the brand. Moving along the header, the user has the following options:
- Text only: The user has the option to view the page in text format. An important feature for accessibility.
- Help: Launches a new window and directs the user to frequently asked questions (FAQ). Very helpful!
- Search: The user has the option to search for anything within the BBC content. I typed in Top Gear first, this lead me to episodes I could watch via the iPlayer. I could also sort the list alphabetically and by most recent. I also typed in ‘carpet ears’, just to see how their search feature would deal with a random word(s). It returned an expected ‘No results found for ‘carpet ears”.
- Explore the BBC: This button allows the user to navigate to other BBC content by launching a little navigation pop up. I can see this being useful for the user who wants to quickly navigate to other areas of the BBC website. They have used popular categories and TV shows to populate the navigation panel. Maybe this could be modified to introduce a social aspect within the iPlayer website infrastructure.
2) Here resides the primary navigation for the iPlayer’s homepage. These buttons are the second largest buttons on this webpage. Using my existing knowledge of interface design (from the previous project) I would say they are that size to draw the user’s attention to them. They are the same size as the iPlayer’s ident. They also feature second in the homepages structure.
The categories of the navigation are defined by importance. They are there for the user to navigate through a vast range of content with easability. Kostas Terzidis, who wrote ‘Algorithms for Visual Design. Using the processing language‘ wrote in his introduction:
‘When designing software, one is actually codifying processes of human thinking to a machine. The computer becomes a mirror of the human mind, and as such, reflects to a certain level our own way of thinking’.
So the primary navigation of such an expansive website has to be intuitive for user(s) to process. I think this has been executed well, within the design and functionality of the homepage.
3) TV highlights features a variety of content from the BBC’s TV channels and Radio stations over the previous seven days. It is presented in a slideshow format. The user can change the content by clicking the TV or RADIO tab. The content is represented as graphic still of the show, with a caption of the shows title. The user can easily identify with the content by recognizing characters from the stills. There is also a playhead symbol, situated next to the title for the user. This helps the user to quickly navigate to the shows page, where the user can watch or listen to the content.
4) The largest section of the iPlayer’s homepage is divided up and features an array of widgets. Widgets in the context of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) are compact, minimalistic visual elements of an application that hold and display useful and important information. I would say that the iPlayer’s widgets have been designed to allow user’s to quickly access BBC content with a direct approach, in a simplistic and accessible manner.
Side note: Looking back so far at this analysis I can see that these four sections within the iPlayer’s homepage structure have allowed the user to access content. Each section has been cleverly thought about on how the user can find and navigate to BBC content.
5) This small section features two external links to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. RSS feeds provides a user with a summarized block of information (normally in text format) normally from a website the user has subscribed too. RSS feeds are used widely in blogging and website content updates. The BBC have used RSS feeds to inform it’s users of new content appearing on the iPlayer’s website.
Although this is a great working feature within the iPlayer’s infrastructure, I feel that not everyone accessing the iPlayer’s website would know what an RSS feed is. Perhaps if they were to include a caption after the links like: ‘What are RSS feeds?’. Maybe that would introduce more frequent visits to the site. Apart from that the execution of the RSS feeds has been done to a great standard.
6) The footer (Normally the bottom and last part of a websites structure) doesn’t really relate to the iPlayer’s content. But then again, it doesn’t really need too. It provides small text based links to mainly corporate information, which is important for the BBC to show. The iPlayer’s footer also provides user’s with important information, which is necessary to include within the design and layout.
Conclusion
The BBC have desiged and developed a highly sophisticated website for it’s users. The design has enabled the websites vistors to easily access BBC content, through different forms of navigation methods. The design is also intuitive and user friendly.
My only critique was with the RSS feed, but that can be easily fixed. I can understand why the BBC want some form of social interaction within the iPlayer. It would appeal to a wider audience aswell as please it’s current vistors. With the popularity of social networking, I see this as a positive step in progression of the BBC’s iPlayer.
iPlayer on iPod touch (mobile format)
Requirements: Internet Connection
The brief does state that the focus should be primarily on a web solution but It also states that we should understand how it runs on other platforms/ devices. So im going to perform a quick analysis of the iPlayer functioning on an iPod touch.
The iPhone/ iPod touch version of the BBC iPlayer runs typically as you would expect it to run on a mobile device. The design and architecture of the iPlayer, on the iPod touch has been minimalized to work within the pixel dimensions of the device. It still has the same look and feel of the iPlayer’s website (Which is important!). This time around your greeted with the following options on the main page.
- Home – TV – Radio
- Search
- TV Highlights
- Radio highlights
- Most popular TV
- Most popular Radio
- BBC information
Looking at the structure above I can see what the BBC view as the most important methods of navigation for the user. I can probably guess that these catagories were chosen through research and feedback from the beta releases. These catagories, formated as widgets provide the user with quick navigation to the content their searching for. This time the videos run via Quicktime, instead of Flash on their website version. Maybe due to the battle between Apple and Adobe on Flash for the iPhone/ iPod.
The BBC have created a minimalistic, easy-to-use version of the iPlayer for the iPhone/ iPod. Extending the iPlayer across mobile platforms has provided their users to engage with iPlayer content on the move. As I mentioned above, adding a social aspect within the platform should benefit the BBC in terms of usability and expand their user base. I can now see the importance of this brief!
D&AD student awards 2009 – iPlayer brief
Last year the BBC’s brief for the D&AD student awards was to create a suite of widgets, these widgets would inform and engage it’s users with BBC content in new ways. Looking at the previous winning entries, and judges comments, should give me ideas on how to tackle this brief.
Christian Söderholm, Dennis Rosenqvist – BBC Tag Player
Söderholm and Rosenqvist, who both won a yellow pencil for the iPlayer brief took a slightly different approach to the brief. They worked against the brief and innovated the brief itself. They created one master widget that would allow user’s to create tag’s on iPlayer content. The user has the ability to find out information with a single click on a tag.
Their research methods were based on how people find out information whilst watching TV, and if they have some information how do they want to share it with friends. They created a tag service within the iPlayer that allowed user’s to tag content. These tag’s would allow others to find out information easier. It also acts as a portal to more content.
What the judges said… (shortened)
James Capp – AKQA London: The ‘tagging’ idea is a big thought that you could see revolutionising the way we access BBC content.
Adam Powers – BBC: The winning ‘tag player’ piece had an innovative concept that was confidently / appropriately presented… Very engaging. Good ideas that were clearly articulated.
James Temple – R/GA London: Students should focus on simplicity of message, social integration of thoughts and going beyond the obvious. The ‘Glastonbury festival’ piece had great unique thought. All the top four were very well executed with solid creative thought.
Steve Gibbons – BBC Future Media & Technology: it identified the target audience. Great confidence behind it and consideration of different platforms.
Will Bloor – The Team: The best made use of multimedia narratives or clear, well-presented layouts. [The First] was brave, bold and well explained.
Benjamin Breckler – BBC Native iPhone Apps
Breckler branched out from the widget concept and designed native iPhone apps. These iPhone apps intergrated functionality with other applications within the iPhone. A good example of this was the iPlayer Radio App. You could set an alarm within the iPhone to automatically launch and play BBC radio with the specified time set. Breckler’s presentation of design brought out the best of his concept.
Will Bloor – The Team said: [The other winning pieces] had very strong, clear concepts, and made good use of the functionality on the phone they were designed for.
Statistics of content sharing
AddtoAny is a major way in which online user’s share content. Companies such as Yahoo! Italy/U.K./Ireland use AddtoAny’s button within their website for user’s to easily share content in various ways.
AddtoAny released statistics in 2009 on the most popular ways in which user’s share content online:
(Source).
As you can see from the graph above, Facebook is taking pole position with 24% of content sharing. Using Facebook integration in some form with this brief would enable the BBC iPlayer to reach out to a mass audience.
Twitter released statistics in 2008 on web traffic from around the world. They mention in their blog that these statistics are only from web traffic, not including SMS, 3rd party applications etc.
As you can see from the graph above a huge slice of web traffic comes from the US with 40%. The UK with only 10%. As the iPlayer’s content is restricted to the UK this doesn’t really matter to a certain extent. Although it’s still valuable research, knowing what percentage of content sharer’s within the UK are using Twitter.
BBC iPlayer statistics December 2009
The BBC released iPlayer statistics for November and December 2009. I’ve taken out the most relevant slides from December’s PDF to discuss further. (Source).
You can see over the period of 12 months the iPlayer has gained 47.2 million more requests. The ratio of TV requests to Radio is quite alot higher. Andrew, our course lecturer at Brighton University mentioned that the Radio service could do with some sort of relaunch.
Looking over the most viewed programmes of December 2009 you can start to get an idea of the age groups using the iPlayer service frequently. With programmes: Top Gear and Gavin and Stacy ranking above the other’s, it’s an important factor that the social and sharing aspect will target this audience. This audience will probably be the core content sharer’s, in which they will most likely tell their families and friends.
It’s not surprising to see Sir Terry Wogan’s Radio show ‘Wake up to Wogan’ rank top of the list. It would seem a good idea to strongly consider how people share Radio with one another. As I mentioned above, Andrew our course lecturer said that the Radio aspect within this brief will be greatly overlooked. This is something I will definitely take into consideration whilst developing my idea on this brief.
These platform requests statistics show that most users are streaming content on a PC. I would guess through their website. Maybe adding a social aspect where people could ‘get together’ to watch content could be a possible idea. The iPhone and Playstation 3 both play a major role in delivering content to the end user. Adding social aspects within the Playstation Network (PSN) could attract more users to share content.
The last slide I choose to include was on age and gender. Probably the most interesting statistics from the report. As the BBC mentioned, this monthly survey is carried out on 700 UK adults. You can see from the bar graph that the age and gender barriers are blurring together. Although im not too sure whether a social aspect will appeal to the older iPlayer users. Designing the solution will have to entertain and engage user’s from all age groups. Which is obviously a tremendous challenge.
Future trends for sharing content
I thought it would be a good idea to search for inspiration from future trends. Gathering information from future trends should enable me to think how people are likely to socially interact and share content in the near future. This will hopefully lead me to generate a more original idea. Below is a small list of excerpts I found within my research. I choose these excepts as I felt they could prove helpful in generating ideas.
- Social media begins to look less social
With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more “exclusive.” Not everyone can fit on someone’s newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it’s likely that user behavior such as “hiding” the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it’s not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.
Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
With approximately 70 percent of organizations banning social networks and, simultaneously, sales of smartphones on the rise, it’s likely that employees will seek to feed their social media addictions on their mobile devices. What used to be cigarette breaks could turn into “social media breaks” as long as there is a clear signal and IT isn’t looking. As a result, we may see more and/or better mobile versions of our favorite social drug of choice. (Source).
- Social Entertainment
Infotainment opportunities – social activities with an intellectual flavor – will be the latest cool events, with salons, forums and debates moving to bars, clubs and festivals. A new crop of celebrity intellectuals emerges. (Source).
The quirks of graphic user interfaces (GUI)
During a conversation with Andrew, (one of our university course lecturers) he mentioned that I should include some sort of quirky aspect within my idea. This reminded me of Facebook’s ‘Like’ feature, shown bellow:
Facebooks ‘Like’ feature, allows a user to respond to someones activity with a ‘thumbs up’ icon. The ‘Like’ can be seen as positive and negative to someone’s activity depending on the context.
Another example could be Vimeo’s like button:
In Vimeo’s context the ‘Like’ button is a way you can archive videos you like, so you can easily find and watch your ‘Liked’ videos.
Using a quirky aspect within my idea and design will enable users to respond quickly to shared content.
