BBC Evoke

D&AD New Blood Award Entry
Brief
The challenge is to Design a new customer experience or service to help the BBC’s audiences fit the BBC services into their daily lives, tailored and optimised to where they are and the device they are using.
Solution
Our solution, BBC Evoke, takes users real time audio and video surroundings and curates unique BBC content that is suited to their current environment. The concept of using real time data and object recognition technology makes the experience transparent and the content relevant, also prevents user's concern on data collection.

Full Process

Brief Analysis

From analysing the brief, we were able to identify some important takeaways.

Join up the whole BBC - Don’t focus on a specific area, product, or platform. Instead think of ways to create a link between various areas of the BBC portfolio. 

Make it personal - Create something that fits into people's daily lives in a personal, tailored way. Something that becomes unique to them by adapting to their experience.

Consider the users’ environment - Use data from the environment, build something that uses ambient intelligence to respond to streams of localised data. 

Research into BBC

By surveying users of BBC services we hope to gain an understanding of how their services are most commonly used: at what times, location, frequency etc. and to gain an understanding of why, do people trust the BBC? Do people consider the content to be of a high value?

Quantitative
– Which BBC services are most commonly used
– Where are BBC services most used (Home, Work, Commuting)
– On which platforms are BBC Services most used (TV, Mobile, Computer)
– At what times are users most active on BBC services

Qualitative
– How much do people trust information from the BBC
– Of what quality do people consider content from the BBC to be
– What are peoples favourite services

Where did we reach out?
We have sent surveys to different platforms including Reddit, the largest internet forum, Facebook groups where people exchanges surveys and we also posted it to survey exchange group, Pollpool.

What did we find out?

- Regularly used by most respondents  
- Most frequently used at home and in the evenings
- Most engagement on TV, computers and mobile phones
- Most engaged with services are BBC News and BBC iPlayer
- Generally considered trustworthy and of a high standard 

Research Summary

Our research, helped us to conclude: qualitatively the BBC has a generally positive reputation, the majority of the respondents to our survey answered with at least 7 on a 10 point scale when asked how much they trust the BBC, and the same is true when asked about their view on the quality of BBC content. The BBC Services has a regular use by its users in the evening at home and BBC's online services appear to be the most popular.

Problem Statement

The BBC is popular and trusted, but a significant portion of their audience don’t stray from their main platforms. How can we deliver varied content that is relatable to the user, where they are?

User Personas

The BBC audiences are varied, so we created three different personas, from a 21 year old student to a 65 year old plumber.

Ideations

Having gathered an understanding of the BBC and its audience, we began mind mapping specific areas for exploration. We were able draw out some key points to consider throughout our process and areas within which to ideate.

At home, Our research showed most people use BBC Services at home, and the brief states to create something ‘Optimised to where they are’. Location based ideas are worth exploring too. The brief states to consider ‘ambient intelligence’, using the current environment as an influence.
Using the devices they already have, Our research showed people predominantly using The BBC through their online services, and the brief says to design for the ‘device they are using’
Explore all available BBC content, the brief makes it clear to ‘connect its products and services, and open up the full power of the BBC portfolio’.

Initial Concepts

Decision Matrix

Running all our ideas through a decision matrix helped us to draw out some conclusions: using user specific data to suggest content was a consistent high-scorer. Although using only the users current location scores low on answering the problem statement because it ignores the ‘where they arepart. Creating links from the content people already consume to more diverse content also scored well, it may be possible to combine data, and content consumption as a starting point for further content exploration into a single product.These ideas also scored well on nudging people to new behaviour, they don’t necessarily require active effort from the user.

Detailing ideas

Our strongest ideas involved collecting data from the user, specifically data related to their daily life and ambient data, and using this data to algorithmically generate understandings of them to curate varied content from across The BBC.  How could this data be gathered? And what issues could there be associated with doing so? We started to brainstorm ideas related to these questions.

Data Collection

By switching from thinking of passive ways of gathering data, to making gathering the data into an active part of the experience we will make something that is personalised, interactive, and maintains the high level of trust that users have in The BBC. By Making data collection a feature; the user can use their device (phone, tablet) to gather sound recordings, video, and/or photographs and our app will use this data to collect content from across the BBC that relates to that data. The user can then consume that content immediately, or bookmark it for later.

Storyboarding

Storyboarding situations in which people could actively collect data, and then receive content recommendations.

User Journey

We had been thinking that the user uploads some media, and receives some result. But through discussion we realised there’s no reason for this process to be so step-orientated. We could have a solution where the user receives content suggestions in real time as they record video, sound, or both. The blue dashed lines in this updated user journey represent this continuous interaction where the media is playing and the content suggestions are being updated in immediate response.

Wireframing

To test how our idea could work we began making wireframes in Adobe XD. We decided to focus on two flows: uploading a photograph and receiving content recommendations based on it, and receiving recommendations in real time from a live video feed. We chose these two because other features, using other media inputs would follow very similar flows and as such testing these would help us to see how well our app worked.

Interfacing Concepts

We designed these concept UIs in Figma for usability testing.

Usability testing

Through testing a few different interface designs we found that people thought that aesthetically the bubbles design was best, although using cards conveyed the information with more clarity. The expectation people had would be that clicking on a card or bubble would take them immediately to that content, but when we then showed how it would take you to a detailed list of all the content they seemed to approve of this. The relationship between the algorithms insights, and the content recommendations was a problem. People felt that because they were the same shape they naturally grouped them together in their mind.

Branding

To make the BBC Evoke design consistent with the design of other BBC services, we decided to follow the design guidelines released by the BBC. We have used the colours of different BBC services to label them and used BBC’s own typography as a font and used BBC’s icons in Evoke to guide the users.

Design Improvement

Some confusion that became clear form our testing, was going from clicking a bubble to a list ui that is not dedicated to the bubble that was clicked.  To remedy this, we made a dedicated button that never moves that goes to the list. Clicking on an individual bubble takes you to a page dedicated to that content.

D&AD Deliverable

We went back and reevaluated what we were doing for the slides: focusing on how to communicate our idea in a way that was clear & engaging, with all relevant information.

D&AD Deliverable Video