An important part of my role is to ensure that the team I work with have an opportunity to broaden their thinking and develop innovative concepts that feed into the creative development of BBC radio and music on digital platforms.
One recent example was a 2 day workshop with David Wilson, Sarah Challis and Melanie Seyer exploring how we can rethink the Radio 1 chart show online. Two days is not that much time so the emphasis was on generating lots of ideas, filtering those ideas and then sketching concepts.
In terms of facilitation its good to make sure you set the context, and frame what it is that everyone will be exploring during the workshop. Its essentially the briefing, but in most circumstances I don’t like to write a formal brief for a creative, free thinking workshop. I like to set the agenda and then move onto collaborative exploration. My role is to work with the team and help generate great ideas while at the same time steering the workshop, making sure everyone gets a chance to input, and helping the team work through any stumbling blocks. It’s worth bearing in mind that facilitating a workshop is not just about saying ‘right this is what we are going to do’ and getting on with it. Its about setting the tone, creating an environment that everyone feels comfortable in, and injecting enthusiasm and a sense of humour. It’s why I always make sure that I hold workshops away from the office, ideally in a bright space that you can stick things up on the wall, and organising some food and drinks is always a good move.
Anyway, to kick off this particular process our starting point was to generate tons of ideas and often by generating tons of ideas you end up with lists and lists of stuff. The tricky part is then making sense of it.
Some keywords that came up during our brainstorming session
In this project we decided to cluster the various keywords that emerged from the brainstorming into themes. What we have here is the finished piece of work, basically four themes that reflect aspects of the project we thought were important:
Ideas organised into themes
The different themes enabled us to start thinking about the kinds of content we could aggregate and the types of interaction that would be most suitable. So for artists we could grab info about tours, video and photos and for historical events it could be things like exploring various trends through time.
Based on this it was possible to sketch some quick ideas.
Here Sarah and David explored a very visual way of presenting the chart, the idea being that the page would update in real time with a strong emphasis on presenting images and content relating to the artist.
A visual and dynamic way of presenting the chart show
One aspect of this that you can’t quite see from the sketch was the idea of comparing a listeners top 40 with the real top 40 chart. This gem of an idea was something we explored further later on.
Mel explored concepts of plotting artists on a timeline…
A timeline view of the chart
and thinking about how the weather effects what we hear on the top 40:
How does the weather effect the charts?
Out of this process of sketching came the realisation that it was really difficult to assess whether or not any of these concepts would be successful with the audience we wanted to engage who are primarily 14-18 year olds. We did try and attempt to create personas to evaluate whether or not the concepts were meeting that particular needs but to be honest this proved fairly tricky for various reasons and we thought it would be much better and quicker to go out and talk to people. Also what we wanted to steer clear of stereotyping the typical chart show listener which is one of the downsides of fictional personas.
After spending some time on Oxford Street speaking to several people (bear in mind we couldn’t do anything really in depth due to time) and then gathering and organising the feedback some key themes emerged. Firstly younger people will typically follow the chart while doing their homework and more than likely at the same time be on facebook.
Those that are a bit older around the 6th form/college age groups didn’t really follow the chart that vigilantly but might have it playing in the background. Gaming was a big factor that emerged from this age group. In the older 18+ age group people were most interested in deeper information such as the background of artists and interviews.
This process really helped to focus and refine the thinking around what the big ideas should be. After distilling the feedback the next steps were to develop ideas around the three age groups we had spoken to. The following image shows an example of this distillation: the keywords highlight behaviour, interests and media from an individual. What this process helped to do was focus the next phase of the sketching process, because as ideas and sketches were developed the keywords served as a useful reference point.
Three ideas emerged out of this final phase of the workshop: Live Chart, Inside Track and Top Picks.
Sarah’s concept, Live Chart, was developed with 11-13 year olds in mind. It relies on being highly visual and giving real time feedback as the chart progresses on a Sunday. Here is a brief overview of the idea and some of the sketches.
Track comes on air and you get an image of the artist and their chart position:
Big images, lots of interaction and real time changing of content that corresponds with live broadcast
Each button on the right hand side gives you additional information, here you get a history of the track in the charts:
View the history of the track in the charts
And an aggregation of information around the artist including news, blogs twitters:
View extra info about the artist
The second concept is geared towards 14-17 year olds. This concept got all of us really excited because potentially it could be fairly easy to implement. The idea is simple, you select five artists that you think will make up the top 5 in the next chart show. To make your selection you send a tweet to @radio1chartshow followed by the artist name. The game starts every Monday and the earlier you make your selections the more points you get. You score points for every artist featured in the top 5.
David created some polished looking mock ups to illustrate how this could work on twitter:
Top Picks twitter mock up
Some nice visuals of the app on an iphone:
Top Picks on the iPhone
Here are some examples of how it could work on Facebook:
On Facebook
The final idea that Mel pursued was Inside Track. This concept is about the ability to track an artists chart position and as the weeks progress view additonal information such as interviews, sessions and photos.
A track and its high and lows in the charts
A nice touch is having the background change depending on variables such as the weather…
The background changes depending on the weather and possibly other variables
In two days we achieved a lot, brainstorming, speaking to people and sketching out concepts. What is useful about going through this rapid design process is that it gets you focused and as a team, when you know that you don’t have much time, you make decisions quickly and take a few risks along the way. What I like about the outcome of this project is that there are three ideas that cater for different audiences and different contexts of use.
Many of the workshops that I run often lead to a presentation to a wider group, enabling the team to consolidate what they have explored and articulate their experience and ideas. Although the outcomes of the workshop may not immediately go into production at this early phase of creative development, its useful to share ideas with the wider department and inspire them with the process and insights that we gain through this exploration. As a next step Top Picks was the idea that excited us the most and generated the most interest from the wider team so we all want to pursue it further by prototyping and testing it out internally to see how well the idea works.
