Recently we launched our first baby step towards improving the current mobile experience for BBC Radio and Music.
19/12/2011
15/09/2011
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.
01/07/2011
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.
22/04/2011
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.
13/04/2011
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.
22/12/2010
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.
30/11/2010
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.
08/07/2010
A real time Radio 1
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.
04/06/2010
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.
17/05/2010
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!