I’m pretty sure that if you try to think about the whole rope, you’ll just go insane.

The portion of the rope you need to focus on doesn’t need to be just the high approvers. It can be anyone who, if you improve their experience, you’ll see tremendous downstream effect.

The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that by focusing on a small group and making their experience ideal, you see immediate returns and you improve overall experience for everyone involved.

I’m betting that, even though the BBC has a large and diverse audience, there are still a tremendous amount of folks who wouldn’t benefit from any real improvements to the site. These are folks who come very infrequently and whose needs are pretty much already met.

Such as an individual who is not a UK taxpayer, lives in a foreign country, and is only interested in the one page of story that they found on an aggregator site. It’s not clear that focusing on their experience will buy the BBC, your team, or your users any further benefit. However, if you improve the story presentation for avid readers, who are frequent visitors, and rely on the BBC as their main source of news, the individual above will probably reap some benefit.

I’d recommend you avoid trying to think about the whole rope. That will only yield a mediocre experience all around.

– Your favorite Gadfly

But back to the point; our job is 100% reach at the bbc, that means we cannot afford to alienate parts of our audience, even as we improve the experience for those parts who are low or high approvers.

Its one of the reasons we’ve moved to a more personalized approach to our content. Rss feeds, widgets, personalization identity (great preso on Slide share on this FYI).

On the whole, and consideration, she’s right - we have to focus on the WHOLE ROPE, even if we pay a bit more attention to the parts with the biggest knots in them from time to time.