Learning from the BBC Sport redesign

One of the things I have admired for a while about the BBC Internet team(s) and now the GOV.UK (in caps ‘cos they mean business) is just how much of their thinking and processes they share openly on their blogs. In recent months the GOV.UK blog has been a regular source of answers and inspiration and I admire the fact that even amongst the challenging deadlines and rapid iterations so many of the team are encouraged to contribute to the blog.

This post isn’t about the GOV.UK stuff though (for a change!) instead it is about the recent changes to the website I have visited more than any other since the dawn of the world wide web and some of the lessons the BBC team has shared about their decision making and how I am learning from that.

BBC Sport is a site I have relied on for years. I have never switched my allegiance to Johnny come lately sites like Sky Sports News It is one of the pinned pages in my Chrome browser and I check in on it throughout the day – everyday.

It turns out it had been nine years since the Sports pages had been redesigned – and to be honest they were starting to show their age a bit. This became even more obvious when the News section went through its own redesign a while ago. The thing is that despite it looking a bit old school and having less than optimal navigation it was a site that many of us could use blindfolded so long had we used it and as such any changes were bound to attract comment.

On of my major personal netiquette rules is that I don’t rush to complain when sites redesign. This can be difficult with some companies [Facebook I'm looking at you] but in general I try and extend some semi-professional courtesy and give the sites a chance to grow on me.

So when the BBC announced they were planning on doing a major revamp of the Sport site I was prepared to bite my lip and bide my time.

When the site launched I had the initial bit of vertigo at the shock of the new but found myself with two contrasting opinions on the site. I found the actual content pages much improved. The layout and extra space give to the words really helps and the ‘related links’ are more obvious. That said I found (and find) the new homepage difficult and cluttered. There is just too much going on for me to cope with and I find myself avoiding this page now (which probably means I miss some stories I’d be interested in on more minority sports.)

Reading the series of posts that the Sports web team wrote though was very enlightening. It is clear that ‘live’ is very much the driving factor of the site and that is what their (considerable) user research has led them to. I think this is probably where I fall somewhat into the minority use case on perhaps that is why it doesn’t seem to work for me at the top level but improves when I drill down.

I have *very* little interest in getting live sports coverage from the BBC – I find all the ‘real time’ stuff distracting and a little irritating and nothing pisses me off more on the web than auto-playing video (though this has stopped thankfully!). I use the site to check results, occasionally read match reports, catch up on the big news but mainly to read the editorial comment pieces whether they be on the blogs or within the main structure. The Comment & Analysis section is still featured on the homepage but – to me at least – it seems a little buried and a particular victim of the ‘clutter’ I mentioned earlier.

So to resolve this I subscribed to the RSS of all my favourite BBC Sports bloggers for the first time and will in future just use the site for results, the occasional match report and whatever breaking news Twitter flags for me. Seems a decent compromise.

The main thing I was interested in from a work point of view was how they coped with the switch to horizontal navigation. This is something I am keen to do but as they acknowledge it does limit your options compared to the traditional left hand side vertical nav. They addressed this by making some tough choices;

“In order to make the navigation easy to use, we wanted to limit the number of items in the primary navigation to less than nine”

Given the amount of sports the BBC covers a list of nine (with one of them being ‘more Sports‘) was probably challenging but it does give me hope as that wouldn’t be a difficult list for us – however I would have been interested to read about how they decided to structure the navigation on the next level down.

That said the thought processes they have been through (and shared) about navigation and using ‘related links’ to promote content elsewhere in a Google driven world have been extremely helpful and their use of personas is going to force me to revisit that concept (although I remain unconvinced). Also the steps they took to validate the design are interesting with the levels of user involvement – plus I like the look of Axure very much so that is going into my next software shopping list!

So anyway I am very thankful to the Beeb for being so open – especially given the level of grief they get in the comments!

Then again – got to say I do hate the yellow!

Making sense from chaos

Let me put this out there straight away. I am not an organised person. Far from it. Unlike many friends and colleagues I was spared the compulsive list making gene and things like GTD or worrying about ‘inbox zero‘ are about as far from my day to day concerns as it is possible to get.

While I have tended to agree with Cory Doctorow when it comes to dealing with ‘filter failure’ and ‘information overload’ one of the things I have always wished I was better at though is managing to keep a track of my bookmarking online.

I never clicked with Delicious or things like Magnolia really and my use of browser bookmarks has been pretty useless to say the least. I had some success with Google Reader for a while using the ‘sharing’ function but recent ‘improvements’ have pretty much ruined that service for me. Basically I have tended to get by due to a pretty good memory and a capacity to reproduce previously successful searches. It has started to become clear recently though that this isn’t a sustainable solution

So based on various things I have seen people trying via Twitter I am trying out a couple of things to see how it goes.

The cornerstone of my plan is Pinboard. I paid my six quid and set up an account based on multiple recommendations. One of the big selling points for me was how easy it was to sync my Twitter favourites which contained links with the service. I have found myself doing this more and more lately – especially as I have started using Twitter on my phone alot again.

I have also used IFTTT to suck my Google +1 feed in from Plus as [for my sins] I find myself using that more and more – especially with what is left of my Google Reader account [which maybe I should move elsewhere but broken as Reader is these days I still haven't found anything else that suits me.]

I have also synced my Gimmebar account – which is an amazing tool for grabbing screenshots/images from the web and one that I am just starting to use properly – to Pinboard.

So between all of that and a Chrome extension taking pride of place next to Ghostery I think I am pretty well set up – hopefully this time it will stick a little better than in the past

The Cotweet crisis

For the last year or so we have been using Cotweet at work to allow a small group from different teams to all contribute to our corporate Twitter account. This was a key element of us moving from the RSS powered robo-tweets to some attempt at having a human voice coming through (albeit still a pretty corporate and dull one!).

It had been going well though and we are looking to ramp up our social media activity across a couple of channels this year with a particular focus on Twitter (with an account name change and hopefully verified status upcoming) but the fly in the ointment with these plans is the upcoming closure of Cotweet to be replaced by SocialEngage – a product that is very more complex than we need and certainly considerably more expensive than we could justify.

This has led to a bit of a scramble to find a replacement product. I have no qualms about paying for a product – in fact I tend to think that is the only way of ensuring they stick around – but finding something at the right price point has proved challenging.

Our needs are pretty simple – a product that allows multiple team members to contribute a single Twitter account. We don’t need any significant social media analytics but some basic reporting is helpful.

Hootsuite is very much the leader in this space but its pricing structure is less than clear and when you do burrow down into its forums for some explanations it doesn’t make enjoyable reading. An additional $15 per team member per month is pretty excessive and it is clear that they are aiming for big corporates and shiny PR agencies who bill big. There is no way I can justify a $75 a month cost to manage our Twitter account so that is a loser straight away.

I looked at SproutSocial but while it is a very nice looking product it actually works out even more expensive than Hootsuite and like that product is packed with features of little utility to us. Again their goal is clearly to bring in the big agency accounts who can pass on the costs to their clients. The public sector is clearly not a priority!

The third product I checked out is MediaFunnel. This product is a long way from as slick looking as the previous two and has less features but in its favour it does have a relatively sensible pricing structure as well as a focus on team management of Twitter accounts rather than creating a ‘social media marketing dashboard’ which seems to be the goal of the other two. The $1 per month per team member pricing makes this the run away winner for the time being and I am going to trial it for the next month or so at least.

***Update***

@helloBRSTL pointed me to a list of Cotweet competitors on Quora where I discovered GroupTweet which looks like it might be perfect for our needs

If anyone comes across any other options please feel free to let me know.