Category Archives: Work

Keeping it simple

Recently we launched our first baby step towards improving the current mobile experience for BBC Radio and Music.

Visit bbc.co.uk/radio on a phone and you get the following landing page:

When we started off this project we had lot’s of ideas, requirements and features. We considered a number of different options for how we could design the interface. But many seemed to complicate what needed to be quick and easy access to content.

The hardest thing to do in any project is to take things away. But that’s exactly what the team did, through our conversations about what was important for the audience we decided to remove bits and pieces from the interface until we arrived at what you see now in your mobile browser.

To communicate our thinking to the wider team and stakeholders, Nick Ritchie (a designer on the team) created this prototype:

It’s lo-fi but a great way to try out ideas quickly and gauge audience reactions. Over time we will look at how we can enhance the mobile experience adding new features gradually and this way of prototyping is going to help us keep the interface intuitive and simple.

Reinventing Radio 1 and 1Xtra online

Today we have launched the new Radio 1 and 1Xtra homepages that completely reinvent how we think, design and interact with a radio station online.

The new Radio 1 homepage

What you see on the beta websites right now is a dynamic, real time Radio 1 and 1Xtra:

bbc.co.uk/radio1
bbc.co.uk/1xtra

In the next few weeks they will replace the current homepages but for now you need a BBC ID to access them.

It’s an interactive channel that enables the audience to see the output of both stations (by using the station switcher) including music, SMS, tweets, photo’s, video and messages from the presenters themselves. Although it’s usually driven automatically by live feeds of data coming out of the studios, the editorial team are able to manipulate the live stream. When something interesting, e.g. the presenter chatting to a guest, the panel can switch to live video.

Why this new approach is exciting is that it lets you see all of Radio 1 and 1Xtra including the bits that don’t fit into the audio broadcast. The internet is at the heart of how the Radio 1 and 1Xtra audience consume media. To make what we offer compelling, we’ve created a platform for the audience to interact with live radio both directly through the website itself and across the social media they use.


Background

This project kicked off with a team brainstorm to explore, sketch and present ideas. The output of the brainstorm gave us a range of ideas to play with. Reflecting the liveness of Radio 1 was the core theme we wanted to pursue.

We were not starting totally from scratch, we’ve done work in the past that has explored ideas of liveness and visualising radio. The ‘Meet the Listeners’ project is one example where Radio 1 asked listeners to send in a picture of themselves while they were listening to a show and these were displayed in real time on the website.

Back in 2009 we ran visual radio trials. They were most successful when they showed audience participation, what was happening in the studio and the tracks that were playing. You can read more about these trials on the Radio Labs blog.

The difference with this project was that we wanted to rethink the entire Radio 1 and 1Xtra homepages as a live experience and design an interface that would accommodate a range of content such as the music played on the station, text messages and tweets from the audience, messages from the presenters, photos and video.


Designing the live experience

At the beginning of the design process we explored a number of different approaches to reflect the liveness of the stations. These photos give a flavour of the many design iterations we went through.

Some of our initial ideas explored the concept of a stream, similar to what you may find on Facebook and Twitter.

Early content stream concept

To push the stream concept further we explored a more visual approach. One early design concept we were excited about was the idea of presenting live information as a content quilt and creating a feature that would enable the audience to navigate the Radio 1 and 1Xtra schedule.

Content Quilt

Another approach to the quilt was adding hierarchy and weighting to the content. In this screenshot we explored the idea of making recent content appear larger. This idea of timeliness started to give the quilt a logic and order.

Content quilt with hierarchy

The third approach illustrates how we decided to combine the previous two designs with logical timeliness and a hierarchy.

Stream with logical timeliness and hierarchy

At this stage the team were thinking of the live stream only being present within a certain area of the homepage. However we decided to be more ambitious and explore how it could scale to the entire width of the page to be something striking and prominent. The end result was something that strongly resembles what you see live on the websites.

Early version of the live panel

The next step from here was improving the interface of the live panel. We made a number of improvements on initial designs including a more descriptive treatment of the programme navigation.

The live panel on the website

By including this programme navigation it’s possible to navigate the live panel by specific shows. This becomes a really great way to discover new music, for example, if you check out Huw Stephen’s show in the timeline you get all the tracks he played.

All the tracks played on the Huw Stephen's show

To enhance the live experience further we also designed the functionality to send a message directly to the studio. This has huge potential as it enables DJ’s to talk about it on air and encourage the audience to participate with the show. The best messages can then be presented in the live stream for everyone to see.

Sending a message

The new design also integrates the most popular sections of Radio 1 as tabs enabling the user to switch the content of the live panel. The DJ’s and Shows tab is where we’ve introduced the ability to customise your Radio 1 and 1Xtra experience.

Radio 1 DJ's

This panel effectively acts as a short cut for regular visitors to access their favourite DJ’s and shows.

User testing was a really useful part of our design process to help validate the concepts we had for presenting and navigating the live panel. The feedback helped us iterate the responsiveness of the interface and also refine the visual design.

Another new feature we’ve introduced is ‘love’.

Recommendations

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make”
Lennon/McCartney 1969

‘Love’ is a totally new feature of the Radio 1 and 1Xtra websites that provides our audience with recommendations. Throughout the schedule both stations generate a lot of content. So we thought a great way to surface some of this content is by providing the user recommendations when they express an interest in something.

Keeping the ‘love’ interaction simple and responsive as possible required a bit of prototyping work to get right. We tried out a few ideas, exploring different animations and interactions. The video below is an example of an early prototype.

The end result is a very simple interaction, every object on the page has a ‘love’ icon and when clicked you get an instant recommendation that relates to that content.

Homepage recommendations

A new way of presenting the message of the station.

On the old websites, Radio 1 and 1Xtra promoted their biggest shows and best content in a conventional carousel. Although this was neatly placed in one space, what it didn’t do very well was give the audience a sense of change and reflect the mood of the station.

Current Radio 1 homepage

With the new homepages we designed a promotional area that can change throughout the day reflecting all the exciting stuff that each stations wants to shout about.

This video illustrates how we imagined the promotional area to work with content pouring out of the live panel and into the space around it.

To visualise the concept further we produced a grid that illustrates how the latest content would filter through the grid.

How content flows through the grid

The final design stays true to our content quilt concept. Instead of hiding the content within different areas of the website the homepage now reflects all of it in a very visible and immediate way. Every piece of content is clickable, interactive and can be watched and listened to in-situ. With music tracks we’ve made the experience as rich as possible, designing a lightbox that can aggregate lots of content about the track and the artist such as chart position, biog and related clips.

A light box of a track showing chart position, 30 second preview, artist biog and related clips.

Watching content in-situ

Final thoughts

The new homepages create a contemporary radio experience, visualising the output and making it interactive online. We hope to learn as much as we can from this launch and use the insight we gain to design and build better radio experiences in the future.

Credits

The team behind this project included myself (Senior Creative Director), Tom Spalding, (Senior Designer), Tim Broom (Designer), David Wilson (Designer), Wai Tai Li (Designer), Chris Johnson (Project Lead), Patrick Sinclair (Tech lead/producer) and Sarah Dain (Project Manager). We conceived and designed the website and partnered with the very talented technical team at Kite that included Tim Stansbie, Matthew Glub and Oli Ashford who wrote the code, built the admin system and delivered the technology to make the project come to life.

Challenge mapping

Recently I’ve been using a technique called Challenge Mapping. The technique frames problems as challenges which enables you to cut through negative thinking. In a recent workshop my challenge was “How might I enable the UX team to synchronise their work”. After establishing the challenge you begin to diverge on a question such as “Why might we want to enable the UX team to synchronise their work”, in my example the reason why I want to synchronise their work is so that they are able to create a common set of features, functions and designs. In the challenge map this is phrased as “How might we create a common set of features, functions and designs.” The secondary area of divergence is asking the “What’s stopping…” question. This narrows the original challenge into more task orientated sub-problems. In my example, what is stopping me from synchronising the team’s work is a lack of shared priorities. So in my challenge map this is phrased as “How might we create a set of shared priorities”.

I’ve found this exercise a very effective way to focus on what I need to do to meet a challenge. It enables you to understand the relationships and connections between challenges. Asking a “What’s stopping…” question is a great way of uncovering the obstacles that are in the way of resolving a problem. Similarly the “Why…” question can give clarity on what might be the next step on from meeting a challenge.

The image below is my complete challenge map that shows the original challenge “How might we enable the UX team to synchronise their work”. With everything below that being the “What’s stopping…” challenges and everything above the “Why…”.

Challenge Map

Desert Island Discs relaunch

Desert Island Discs recently relaunched on the Radio 4 website (at the end of March) on almost the same date that we held the Desert Island Discs hackday a year ago to explore what we could do with the archive data. Since the hackday a lot of work took place including the rebranding of Desert Island Discs and commissioning magneticNorth to help us design and build the new website and create a compelling experience for exploring the archive. It’s been exciting seeing the project take shape over the year and building up to the launch date.

This project had many challenges and one of the first we tackled was the branding. We commissioned Fallon to produce the brand kit and it went through a number of iterations before we settled on a unique and distinctive design that combines and reflects the concept of music and being stranded on a desert island.

We took inspiration from a number of sources which predominately came from album covers and record label designs. Trojan record covers and the Island records brand stick out in my mind as the most influential pieces of inspiration during this phase of the project.

Trojan records

Island records

We wanted the new logo to be as versatile as possible to enable us to use it in many different contexts and permutations, in particular it was important for us to have a toolkit that could be used to give the website a sense of life and distinctiveness which is something we achieved.

The brand kit provides flexibility not only in how we can use the lock up but also the discs and colour palette.

Another key challenge for this project was creating a simple and intuitive way to explore the archive. Chris Thorne led the IA on the project and has written in detail about how he approached the domain model. The process was iterative exploring different routes to present the navigation, layout and filters.

An early wireframe showing an example of the search page.

The result of this iterative wireframing and prototyping process is the killer feature of the website, the search page, which enables the audience  to filter the archive by date, occupation, gender, musical choices, books and authors, presenter and of course castaway names.

A photo of the search page being pieced together from different options that were proposed at the time.

All searches eventually take the user to the castaway page which the guys from Magnetic North designed elegantly. It’s the overview of musical choices that bring’s the page to life and a nice touch is how each musical choice links to our BBC Music artist pages providing an onward journey to discover more content.

Musical choices from Jamie Oliver's castaway page.

Early in the concept phase we considered many different ways to introduce the audience to the archive, one example was enabling the audience to input their musical tastes or provide their last.fm profile and the website would then automatically suggest episodes for you to listen to. In the end we decided that a strong editorially curated homepage would enable our audience to browse and discover the rich archive Desert Island Discs has to offer. The discovery and serendipity of the homepage works particularly well with the combination of a visually compelling carousel and a selection of programmes organised by occupation.

Desert Island Discs homepage

Myself and David Jones (editorial lead) considered a number of different ideas that could enhance the Desert Island Discs website beyond searching the archive. The programme lends itself well to audience participation because of the loyal fan base. The  rare insight into the lives of very successful people using music as a soundtrack to emphasise particular memories in their lives and provides a stimulus for discussion on social networks. Early on during our development myself and David did a quick audit of Desert Island Discs activity on various websites and we found that there was healthy activity on facebook and twitter. This initially made us think about ways in which we could encourage audience participation on the Desert Island Discs website.

Audience participation wireframe

At the time we thought this would introduce a new dynamic enabling the audience to contribute their content to the website. Although it felt like an exciting avenue to pursue eventually we decided time and effort was better spent on the core editorial proposition of the archive. This doesn’t mean we may never do this in the future however…

The Desert Island Discs website is, in my personal opinion, one of the best BBC websites we’ve ever done as it provides such a rich resource of unique and intrguing content that you cannot find anywhere else. The beauty of it is that it presents a simple user interface with an elegant design, driven by a considered data architecture that provides the audience with opportunity to discover and stumble upon insightful and thought provoking content.

 

Product Pinocchio

Currently I’m working on a new product for the BBC. As ever with something that is completely brand new its important to explore and generate lots of ideas early on using a variety of methods and techniques. In the context of this project I encouraged a multi disciplinary team of people to brainstorm and help define what this new product could be using a technique called Product Pinocchio. The technique is featured in a book called Gamestorming that contains a number of different ‘games’ that can be played in a variety of contexts to engage people in ideation, planning and sketching.

Brainstorming

Product Pinocchio requires the group of people you are working with to suspend belief as its all about pretending that the product you are working on has come to life. By personifying the product its possible to better to relate to it and craft it into something amazing.

What am I like? What are my values? What is my mission in life?

To some people this is a bit of a leap so its useful to emphasise why the work they are doing is so important and what the group are aiming for.

In the context of the session I facilitated its essentially about defining a set of key characteristics for the product and enabling the team to do three things:

  • firstly it enables the team to arrive at a consensus on what the defining values, behavious and characteristics of the product should be.
  • secondly the output of the exercise provides stimulus for the design process (from both a creative and product management perspective).
  • finally on a broader level the work from the exercise will help influence the way in which we think about the product and its direction.

After an initial warm up exercise we dived straight into Product Pinocchio. The game involved the following five exercises:

What am I like?

This exercise is all about each group describing their character using adjectives and phrases. To help some groups it was useful to use associations such as ‘what animal would your character be’ or ‘if your character was a celebrity who would he or she be’.

What am I like? Post it note exercise to define the values of the product.

What are my values?

The purpose of this exercise is to get the teams thinking about how their character would respond in a specific situation. So for example, how would your character react to someone asking he/she for change in the street? would they be kind or cold to that person? the aim of this exercise is to tease out the characters values from its behaviours in a particular situation.

What are my values?

What are my values?

What is my community?

Who does the character hang out with? What is the characters circle of friends? Who does she/he interact with in their daily lives?

What is my community?

What makes me different?

How does the character stand out from the rest of the crowd?

What makes me different?

What is my mission in life?

What motivates the character? What keeps him or her up at night?

What is my mission in life?

After tackling these five exercises the final task was to prioritise the characteristics . This was done by dot voting against the characteristics the team felt best reflect the aims and aspirations of the product. The output of this prioritisation is key as it enables the team to arrive at a consensus and also provides triggers for design stimulus and a set of principles or criteria that can be used as a reference throughout the product development.

The feedback following this workshop was very positive, everyone felt engaged and that it was a successful exercise in shaping and defining what the product should be and what we should be aiming for.

As with all brainstorming exercises the technique becomes more refined with practice. When I’m conducting this exercise again there are number of things I would repeat and a few things I would change. Useful things to bear in mind if you are running your own Product Pinocchio workshops in the future are:

  • A brief run through the exercise at the beginning (using a popular product) is a useful technique to get the group warmed up and really helped to set the scene.
  • Right at the beginning of the workshop give people a sense of how their work and the output of their exercises will be used to inform the product development.
  • At the end of each exercise get the groups to feed back to each other.
  • Prioritisation of the output from each group is important. I did all the prioritisation at the very end however in retrospect it may have been more manageable to do it after each exercise and then summarise at the end.
  • Give each group plenty of examples at the beginning of each of exercise. This helps to contextualise what they are brainstorming and start them off in the right direction.
  • I found some groups did better at some exercises than others. This is ok as long as you get the groups feeding back to each other so they can inspire each other and take learnings from other groups into subsequent exercises.

With workshops such as Product Pinocchio, product development can be fun and engaging and change the way we capture stakeholder, business, user requirements and ideas.

The faintest ink is better than the best memory…

The creative process is riddled with unexplainable moments, this scene from Mad Men captures the frustration of losing an idea to that moment of genius where one piece of inspiration sparks another.

BBC Music showcase

A new section on the BBC Music website launched today called Music Showcase. This section brings together all of the best audio and video music clips from the BBC and enables you to browse them in collections compiled by presenters and staff. As its just an alpha release this will be the first of many iterations with more improvements and features released as we move to beta and then a final version.

It’s a great achievement and lots of talented people have worked on creating a compelling experience for music loving audiences. One of my favourite features is the play bar. For the first time on a BBC website its possible to have a continuous watching/listening experience as you browse. The service also features around 3000 clips at launch with more to come and a selection of collections made by our own DJs and presenters.

For me this is an exciting milestone as I think we have launched a distinctive music service, which is no easy task given the huge number of digital music services that are out there. It’s an important launch because for the first time its possible to find music content from the BBC outside of its original full length context. The iPlayer does a good job of aggregating full length programmes and if you know what you are looking for its possible to navigate your way through one or many programmes to watch or listen to your favourite artist. However this can be a hassle if all you want to hear is a specific interview or live session for example. With the music showcase its possible to view an aggregated view of short form content in a number of different ways such as genre, artist and most popular. This is a more intuitive and appropriate way of navigating music in the digital space, providing a neat way to be entertained and discover new music.

From the outset we focused on developing a service that fulfilled what audiences wanted from a BBC music website. One of the key pieces of feedback we received from people was having curated collections of content from the talented people that the BBC employs. This provides a unique angle on the content which can be inspiring, for example check out this interview with Marvin Gaye featured in the Gideon Coe collection.  Andy Puleston, Interactive Editor, discusses the editorial aspect of the site in more detail over at the Music blog.

In terms of the overall user experience of the website we have kept things simple focusing on putting the music at centre stage using a contemporary bold design. As well as the seamless playback we have created an intuitive interface that includes useful features such as being able to switch between different views of the content, quick access to collections and clips and an artist quickfind. Sacha Sedriks, a Senior Designer on my team, has posted his thoughts on the interaction design of the website, highlighting both the innovation and challenges we encountered in the creative process.

This is the first step in what is going to be an exciting 12 months for music on the BBC!

You can read more over at the BBC Internet blog.

A real time Radio 1

broadcast

A little while ago Broadcast magazine published a piece on a project I’m currently working – the revamp of Radio 1 online. We are only a few weeks into the creative process but already the team have generated lots of great ideas and we have settled on a direction that we feel can deliver the innovative experience we want the Radio 1 audience to engage with.


I think the most exciting aspect of the work so far is that the homepage is a radical departure from where we are at the moment. It really changes the way we think about a typical BBC radio homepage by incorporating live video and real time information. The real time component is key and makes what we are building distinctive, as Ben Chapman (Interactive Editor for Radio 1) mentions in the article, the purpose of the project is to bring the station to life online. To achieve this we are exploring how we can create a homepage that is constantly changing and updating with lots of strong visual information (using a combination of images, video and a strong use of typography) and the use of playful interactions.

This new approach to presenting Radio 1 online will illustrate how we can start using real time info from radio studios in a compelling way and create an experience that makes people want to engage with all the exciting things that Radio 1 does. Last year we ran two trials of  a visual radio player (trial one, trial two) that combined real time elements such as text messages, track information and video, it was a great learning curve for everyone involved and the work we are now doing is a significant evolution. At the moment many websites that accompany tv or radio programmes feel very much like very much like supporting material rather than something that’s actually synchornised with what is going on in the broadcast.

Timeliness is important and by incorporating it into the website and enabling people not only to see whats happening right now but also skip back in time and see what they have missed the homepage becomes more than just a compliment to the radio network it becomes an interactive broadcasting channel in its own right.

A talk on Innovation Design

Recently I was asked to give a talk at an internal BBC away day on the concept of Innovation Design. The word innovation is often overused, to the point where it has become almost meaningless to most people. In this talk I discuss how innovation is about influencing somekind of change no matter how big or small and how taking a grass roots approach is often the best way to approach innovation within a big organisation.


My aim in this presentation is to not come across like the man in this advert.

Innovation is a word that gets used a lot but what does it actually mean? In the dictionary it gives a very broad definition.

“Something new or different introduced.”

But I think its useful to think about innovation in terms of bringing about somekind of change no matter how big or small. This might be through introducing something completely new into the world or re-purposing something that already exists either way its about bringing ideas to life and the execution of these ideas may be a physical or a cultural thing.

There are plenty of examples throughout history of innovation and I’m sure many of us can think of several such as the internet, the camera, the bicycle and there contemporary examples that may not seem so obvious but are also valid such as Street Car, a service that changed the way people rent cars in London and the Dyson that changed the way people use and perceive vacuum cleaners.

Dyson picture by Robert Scarth

The problem with the word innovation is that when you use it, it instantly sets an expectation. If I said to you I’m going away to think about creating an innovative mobile experience. Your expectations are more than likely going to be quite high because of what you know of the iPhone. The iPhone is a fantastic user experience and instantly set the bar in terms of mobile product and interface design.

But I think this perception of innovation being this grand thing, this holy grail to attain is misleading. Innovation happens in lots of different contexts and on many different scales. Its borne out of a natural curiosity of observing the world around you, being inspired and then acting on it.

Take for example the wind up radio a small innovation that had a meaningful impact on peoples lives.

© All rights reserved, Ewan Bellamy.

Back in 1991 Trevor Baylis saw a TV programme about the spread of AIDS in Africa and was shocked at the lack of access to information that people had about the ways to halt the disease so he set out to develop the Wind Up Radio.

One aspect of the term ‘innovation’ that bothers me is that its a word that gets very overused it is. Its become part of business speak a buzzword among many where it almost becomes meaningless. This is a another one from IBM which sums up nicely what I mean.

There are hundreds of books that aim to teach you how to be innovative. There’s the art of innovation, ten faces of innovation, making innovation work: measure it and profit from it, the oxford handbook of innovation, managing innovation, innovation a short introduction. I’m sure a lot of these books do have some useful information to impart but if you look at many of the great innovations that have happened throughout history they have occurred through curiosity, experimentation, exploration, trial and error, accidents, passion these keywords for me are the characteristics needed to make innovation happen. I think a good example of this is the story behind the creation of the mountain bike (and I’m going to paraphrase Charles Leadbeater who uses this as an example in his TED talk).

The mountain bike came from young people who were frustrated with the bikes that were available during the late 60′s which consisted of traditional racing bikes or bikes that had big handlebars and were too heavy. So, they got the frames from these big bikes, put them together with the gears from the racing bikes, got the brakes from motorcycles, and sort of mixed and matched various ingredients. And for the first few years of their life, mountain bikes were known as “clunkers.” and they were just made in a community of bikers, mainly in Northern California.

© All rights reserved, Mr Yeti.

It was another 10 -15 years later before the big bike companies realized there was a market. In the present day mountain bike sales, and mountain bike equipment, account for over half bike sales in the world. This is a category entirely created by a group of passionate people, that would not have been created by the mainstream bike market because they couldn’t see the need or the opportunity and they didn’t have the incentive to innovate.

This grass roots approach that was taken to create the mountain bike is similar to the approach we need to take in a big organisation. Innovation needs to be part of the culture of day to day work and people need to be empowered to be able to act on ideas they feel are important to pursue.

Prototyping, workshops and hackdays are all methods that enable you to explore and create. And I want to give you an overview of three projects that I’ve worked on that illustrate this in practice.

Two or three years ago there was a lot of talk about visual radio but no-one really knew what it was or the opportunities that it could open up for radio. So a group of three of us kicked off a project to define what visual radio could be. What we ended up proposing was a prototype that became hugely successful and very influential within Audio and Music. The prototype we created led onto two visual radio trials during 2009 with Radio 1, Switch, Radio 4 and 5 live. The trial’s boosted traffic to these sites by 50% and on top of that it gained a lot of press in the media.

Visual radio player from the first trial

The entire process from ideation to execution was collaborative with editorial producers, ux, tech and DJ’s working together and it really opened up the eyes of the production teams to what is possible for radio on new platforms.

The technological innovation was that we created a console that brought together real time video, track info, text messages, studio updates and enabled the audience viewing the console to interact by sending messages and responding to calls to action.

The cultural innovation was that the production teams have started to think about their content in a much broader and interactive way.

And what is really exciting now is that we are starting work on a new project that will continue the evolution of using the web as a real time, interactive, broadcasting channel.

Another example is a workshop we did a few months ago exploring how we might evolve the Radio 1 chart online. The chart has been like it is for a long time now and doesn’t reflect how people interact with music these days. So seeing the potential of exploring another perspective on the Radio 1 chart we embarked on a two day workshop away from the office where we sketched ideas, talked to listeners of the chart show, went back to refine out initial ideas and developed three different audience experiences. This work then went onto inform a new beta Radio 1 chart application.

The Love 40

This chart is a radical departure from what has been on the site for many years and its the first attempt to integrate new functionality, and present the chart in a totally contemporary way.

The final example is a very recent hackday for Desert Island Discs. The programme has a rich heritage and recently we managed to aquire the rights to make the archive available online and we have lots of data about the programme such as such as castaway profiles, their music tastes, occupations, luxury items and favourite books. A group of us thought it would be a great idea to organise a hackday bringing together designers, csds and engineers to explore ideas and build prototypes that illustrate different ways of using the archive data.

The outcome of the hackday were a number of compelling ideas such as being to use your last lastfm profile, or manually entering your musical tastes, to connect you to Desert Island Discs castaways. Once these connections are made, other recommendations can be provided to you – programmes on the BBC, books to read and even luxury items.

Last Island Recommendation

Another idea involved analysing transcriptions to create a different way of navigating the programme content.

Rich audio interface

These prototypes and others that emerged from the workshop have really opened up new ways of thinking about how we might present Desert Island Discs online.

What I hope these projects illustrate is how innovation happens from spotting opportunities and being pro active. They also show how innovation can be created with simple ideas and how the way in which we collaborate with each other and our colleagues in other divisions also creates innovation on a cultural level.

Within user experience and design we have the remit not only to define a vision for compelling experiences across many products and services but also to propose and create new ones.

The Love 40

A while back I wrote about how a group of us brainstormed and produced some concepts for the Radio 1 chart show. After this workshop Hugh Garry, Tom Spalding, Patrick Sinclair and Chris Johnson worked with Six to Start to build a live prototype called The Love 40 and its just launched!

It’s a great piece of work and a good exploration of how to visualise and interact with the top 40 chart. It’s a challenge to reinvent something that has a legacy like the top 40 and present it in a completely new way. The interface is responsive and playful encouraging you to have a click around and explore and it will be interesting to see how the audience responds overtime as it’s such a radical departure from the design that has existed for a quite a while on the website (it’s been tweaked and update but essentially the format has remained the same). The way in which people listen and discover music is continually evolving so hopefully this new visual and interactive direction for the Radio 1 chart is just the beginning.

Read more about The Love 40 on Hugh’s blog.

The Love 40