Services and many products…

This blog post is of a talk I recently gave at an internal BBC conference discussing the concept of designing services and  products for diverse audiences.

Here we go…

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I think its important for the User Experience and Design discipline at the BBC to consider designing experiences that go beyond just a website as a destination you visit using your computer or mobile phone. People demand more from the technology and services they experience in their everyday life and the challenge is that we need to consider how we create experiences that don’t just operate in one context but many.

Rock Band is a good example.

At its core is the video game you can play on your favourite games console. But that isn’t where the experience stops. Rock Band hits that sweet spot where a range of compelling experiences are created through the convergence of music, gameplay, peripherals and the fact that its social and its takes the idea of air guitar to a new level.

The popularity of the game is because its appeals to a diverse audience. The barrier to entry is set severely low, its a pick up and play game and this immediacy lends itself well to casual gamers. Traditionally gaming has always been seen as a geeky pursuit but rock band breaks that by being a game that is socially acceptable.

Even though it appeals to casual gamers, hardcore gamers don’t lift their noses at Rock Band. This is because the game has been designed with varying skills levels, leaderboards and lots of stuff you can unlock.

And it goes further than that. The physical experience of Rock Band doesn’t just stop at the fake guitar and drum kit but also the extends to club nights that are dedicated to the game.

There’s also the community aspect of rock band that happens both on and offline. Online fans can connect with each other, organise battles and share set lists. Offline people get together to watch their favourite bands from the game play live. Check out this clip on Vimeo and fast forward to 8:15 for an example.

And finally what I think is a very innovative move from the makers of the game is that they have made the authoring tools they use to make the game available to bands, studios and record labels and musicians so that they can turn their songs into Rock Band gameplay. This has proved to be massively popular resulting in fairly unknown bands being able to make money from distributing their content on the platform.

As you can see there many different facets of Rock Band to some people its just a game to others its an opportunity to distribute their music on a popular platform and make money.

So how does this apply to us, well we need to start thinking about the landscape we are now working in, which encompasses services and products. Our audiences are really diverse and things that we are designing and building also need to be diverse.

For me this sketch sums up the direction that we are heading, where we have services like bbc /music and /programmes that you can build different products to fulfill different audience needs.

Amazon does this really well, its created a rich eco-system of products that are powered by common platform, there is the website that most of go to buy things, then there are all these extensions of the service such as the widgets you can plug into your site and there is the iPhone app that you can use to take photos of things you see and Amazon will tell whether they have it in stock and of course there is a huge technical infrastructure that Amazon provides for companies and developers to plug into.

In a BBC context this maps onto the thinking that we have been exploring around /music and /programmes. Both services make data feeds available so its possible to create multiple products from these feeds. However before diving into how these products can be presented its useful to have a framework for understanding which experiences are suitable for the different audiences.

This matrix is one tool that helps to identify where user needs are the strongest and where for example, a service like /music can meet them.

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As you can see from the how the heat map animates all these personas have different needs and going through this process enables you to understand what their goals are.

Its at this point we can start using this insight and think about the most appropriate products for these people. Using a concept sheet its possible to map out a journey from someone knowing nothing about /music to having /music fulfill their needs. Typically you can achieve this by using lots of post it notes to map out the journey someone takes through a product experience. At the same time its important to identify the functionality we need from the /music service to bring to life.

What this process emphasises is that there is no one size fits all. we have to consider different experiences, different products that make sense to a diverse audience.

An example might be a product that focuses on delivering broad music entertainment that reflects current popularity and key events which would be ideal for people who don’t have much time and just want to be pointed at the latest and greatest things. Or it could be a set of tools that enables an audience to show off and share their passion for music, useful for people who are really into music and feel that its important for them to demonstrate their knowledge of a particular artist, genre, composer etc.

The real challenge I think is connecting digital services with real world experiences. The way in which we interact with music for example is hugely diverse and an important part of the experience is  going to gigs, clubs, pubs and meeting with friends.

This is where we need to think about how we design experiences that make use of the technologies around us. It might involve traditional marketing techniques combined with a digital interface such as pub beer coasters with QR codes to get exclusive content from the /music website or it could be the ability to scan the bar code of a CD in HMV with your phone that retrieves artist info from /music.

There are plenty of examples out there to draw inspiration from and the tools available to create these interactions are cheap and easy to use. Such as the Arduino which is a simple electronics board you can plug sensors into and you can send and receive data.

Some BBC Audio and Music projects that you may or may not be aware of are useful examples that put this into practice.

For the last couple of years at the Electric Proms we have projected text and Twitter messages on the inside of the Roundhouse.

Last year Kent Lyons created a playful interface where you can navigate the messages by swiping your hand across sensor.

There’s also been the Olinda radio that can connect to the Radio Pop website and informs you if your friends are also listening at the same time. You can read lots more about Olinda and Radio Pop at Cookin/Relaxin.

Then theres the DABagotchi prototype thats lets listener rate the track playing on the radio by squeezing its hand. If you don’t do this enough then it will fall ill (its glowing heart will beat less and dim) and eventually die. If the listener does rate a track then this data is sent to a webserver where it is compared to their previous ratings and other peoples’ ratings, causing the DABagotchi to express appropriate emotions (surprise, confusion, anger…) on its face.

And finally I want to leave you with the Rockterscale, one of my favourite projects, and its basic premise was measuring how hard a band rocks.

Building the Rockterscale! from Ben Hanbury on Vimeo.