Richard Titus Controller, User Experience & Design Unlocking the BBC’s universe of content and services

Fulfilling our public service remit Rapidly changing media consumption habits Growing popularity of non-linear platforms Need to satisfy diverse audience of 40m+ UU’s Challenge … taking the BBC from trusted and traditional

… to trusted and future facing BBC Online is driving a new dynamic Broadcasting means something different in the age of IP connectivity Integral to market prominence in era of broadband and social networking Dynamically-generated pages allow us to better organize and showcase our content “ Playground effect” extending value to existing content

3 rd most visited site in Britain 2500 websites 22.5m UK unique users 17.7m International unique users bbc.co.uk

Groundbreaking when launched Functionally limited Dated visual design Navigation/information balance Home page: past

Home page: now Inviting modern design Searchable Widgetized Personizable Accessible to all

Giving audiences exactly what they want Top user destinations from the Homepage News (1.90m) Local Weather (1.29m) Sport (1.16m) Football (651,656) 5-day Weather forecast (317,973)

Widgetization Content atomized into a feed-based universe Software more flexible, cost efficient and re-usable Browsers and devices lenses to consume and tailor content

Customization + 30% of UU’s have customized their page

Most Added & Opened Most Deleted & Minimised News 7,563,588 CBBC 771,809 Sport 7,313,6555 News 127,630 Blogs 6,183,401 Sport 111,301 Giving audiences exactly what they want

The highest form of flattery BBC homepage is influencing media portals everywhere

Homepage: soon to come User feedback has indicated a desire for external widgets Ongoing discussion with editorial team to evolve compelling proposition Inspiration – Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle, iYahoo, facebook

3 rd party content into BBC widgets Off-BBC widgets Tear-off strips Homepage: soon to come

Visual Language

Visual Language

Visual Language Mobile Service Consistent with visual language Preparing for Customization Mobile service success metrics Text-based service launched 1999 Redesign March 2008 UU’s per month up 6% to 2.9m since refresh Huge news & sport hungry audience Challenge to unite editorial and technical staff

iPlayer: leading the world New iPlayer homepage Consistent with visual language Preparing for widgetization iPlayer success metrics Average time spent 22min 90m programmes watched since launch “ Playground effect” adding value to existing BBC content

iPlayer: ubiquitous potential Iplayer Wii image here

Portable BBC is now available on: PC Mac Set-top box (red button) iPhone Wii And many others…

Semantic Web: IP ubiquity

“ The Lesson of web 2.0 is to leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head. Tim O’Reily Image source: Data

XML customised tags, like: <dog>Nena</dog> + RDF relations, in triples, like: (Nena) (is_dog_of) (Kimiko/Stefan) + Ontologies / hierarchies of concepts, like: mammal -> canine -> Cotton de Tulear -> Nena + Inference rules like: If (person) (owns) (dog), then (person) (cares_for) (dog) = Semantic Web For dummies… Semantic Web

XML customised tags, like:

<dog>Nena</dog>

+ RDF relations, in triples, like:

(Nena) (is_dog_of) (Kimiko/Stefan)

+ Ontologies / hierarchies of concepts, like:

mammal -> canine -> Cotton de Tulear -> Nena

+ Inference rules like:

If (person) (owns) (dog), then (person) (cares_for) (dog)

= Semantic Web

Standardization Inaccuracy for chaos Organic evolution (crowd source) Technology will solve (Google) Metadata Semantic Web - conflict

bbc.co.uk/programmes Persistence pays Permanent, persistent URLs for every BBC Episode Series Brand Programmes categorised by: Channel A-Z Genre Format

Permanent, persistent URLs for every BBC

Episode

Series

Brand

Programmes categorised by:

Channel

A-Z

Genre

Format

Metadata Automatic Programme Support aka /Programmes

bbc.co.uk/programmes Automatic Programme Support Consistent templatized designs Widgetized elements

Metadata

bbc.co.uk/music Semantic notes Permanent, persistent URLs MusicBrainz provides unique ID - artists, albums, tracks etc. Integrate with tracklistings on programme episode pages

bbc.co.uk/music Mashing it up URLs designed to be Restful and expose our domain model Persistent identifiers for our editorial objects makes it easier to mash the systems together Automatically link from an episode tracklisting > artist page > other performances

Topic pages: navigating the content jungle Hard to find latest most relevant BBC content about a topic Users had to navigate a plethora of sites and information Manual updating resulted in duplicate and out-of-date information

Topic pages Extracting the BBC’s finest Google juice Feeds of latest BBC content Automatically updated pages Each covers a person, country or subject Editors can add hand-picked features

How we choose the topics What people are looking for What we have content about BBC editorial priorities Topic pages: how do they work? Feeds are then created from… News including video Programmes on iPlayer Weather forecasts Country profiles TV & Radio schedules

How the BBC Page Assembly Layer works Receives request and looks up modules Extracts them from various BBC systems Assembles modules and returns page to user Data structure is based on the Atom format XSLT is used to transform the XML to XHTML Topic pages: dynamically generated

Mobile Other Platforms Web IPTV Rapidly evolving consumption habits

Controversy Is Search the navigation solution of last result ? Or is it core element of web 3.0? Discovery 1.0

Merger of technology and human editorial Better data => better results (personalized often invisibly) Social book marking used to refine results and change ranking. Inaccuracy cured though crowd sourcing Snapshots (search one thing) idea that there will be NO clicking from search to result . Semantic Web + People Future of search

“ The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” William Gibson