ia play

I’m very happy with our customisable homepage. There’s no sport anymore for me, weather has top billing, and science & history get more space than they used to. Wimbledon was a useful addition over the last fortnight.

What I want from future releases is:

• A food box with a recipe search + the latest recipes + any reasons to celebrate with food that day.
• The week on TV at 9 o’clock at glance. That’s the only time I really watch much so it would be good to see it all in one go. And I’ve only BBC1 & 2 anyway.
• Gardening box with plant(s) of the day. Big shiny flower pictures, perhaps of something good to plant now and something that’s looking good right now .

But as we’re all about user centred design (well, most of the time!) my particular wants won’t decide what we get.

For most of my BBC career, the website wasn’t really about TV & Radio. Discussion were filled with talk of news, sport, weather, recipe finder, GCSE Bitesize, initiatives like iCan and products like Connector, MyBBC, and search.

There were lovingly crafted programme showcases for the top shows like Eastenders and Doctor Who. And there was Radioplayer, well ahead of its time.

But most programmes had no coverage (a temporary schedule snippet notwithstanding) as I discovered in my first few weeks at the BBC. Part of my job was to respond to users who had emailed us via the ‘contact us’ link on the search engine. Query after query asked for information about a programme recently and not so recently seen or heard. We resorted to back catalogues of RadioTimes and lots of apologetically framed replies.

Now the situation is somewhat different, with a number of projects having re-homed programme content on the internet, mostly notably:

• iPlayer 7 day catch-up, TV and Radio
• Catalogue (currently offline) Text based records of the back catalogue, based on the BBC’s internal catalogue produced by Information and Archives
• Archives Trial collections of archive audio, video and written material
• Programmes A page for every programme from October 2007 onwards, some with embedded audio & video from iPlayer

Diverse teams tackling the original problem (no programme support) from slightly different angles and a more experimental, innovation-friendly culture has resulted in an information architecture headache. Part one of solving the resulting problem is integrating the data from Catalogue into Programmes. I’m sure that’ll be a cinch

I’ve been asked to come up with a quantitative measure of success for the information architecture of the BBC website. I won’t be solving this is one post.

Now I’m wary of this. We all know that what you measure goes up. There’s an anecdote (office myth?) about the days when site funding was tied to page impressions and some  (mis-guided) web producers redesigned their interactive quizzes so that each question was on a single page, resulting in higher page impressions.
At the same time, Martin’s been expressing doubts about the BBC Trust chosen metric for measuring the success of the BBC search:

“They state that internal referrals from the search engine are down to 19% of all search referrals from 24% the previous year. Now, of course, there are lies, damned lies, statistics and then web metrics, but I’m unclear that you can argue how ‘good’ or ‘useful’ a site search is from these figures.

People tend to use site search when they are lost or disorientated, not just when they are seeking a specific piece of information. You can use exactly the same figures to argue that nearly a quarter of people used to get lost on the site and had to resort to search, and now only a fifth do - that could equally suggest an improved navigation user experience rather than a deterioration of search quality.”

The attention from the BBC Trust on site search is helpful and correct. But the success metrics need to be chosen carefully else we could genuinely improve the quality of the search and still get marked down as having failed (likewise we could fail to improve the quality but the chosen metric might improve, resulting in pats on the back all round but no improvements for the users). So this stuff is v. important to get right.

But back to measuring the quality of the IA in general…

Our key metrics are reach, impact and appreciation i.e. lots of people spend lots of time on the site and like it so much they tell lots of other people that it was great.

Getting the basic IA right should reduce time spent on site as it would get people where they wanted faster. They would then be appreciative and tell other people, but their time on site might well go down.

But we could make it easier to get around and increase time spent by cross-selling - providing a clear contribution in meeting their expressed needs but also in showing them what else we have that they didn’t know about.

That bit is important because some of the research commissioned for the 2004 Graf review showed that members of the public who took part in the usability tests (and were hence shown lots of the BBC site) were angry that all this free content that their licence fee had funded was there and they didn’t know about it. Cross-selling is a public service duty not just commercial good-sense.

So good IA would mean short (what does this mean?) journeys to each piece of content AND a high number of pieces of content found (and used? and liked? in a single session?).

And what if they get BBC content elsewhere, in some syndicated form? Surely we’ve got to include that too? It might be different with each platform too…the potential for cross selling on mobile might be more limited, given the context of use and time people want to spend looking at content on their phones.

I think around 12 IAs have had to manage our metadata system at one time or another.

One was not bothered by it, had no problems with the work. One other person found it satisfying and actually interesting. Everyone else seems to have found it limiting, frustrating, boring, degrading even. In the admittedly limited frame of IA, wireframes are sexier.

Maybe I’m odd but it was a task I found flow in. There was a rich repository of data to analyse, procedures that could be honed to perfection and theory that could be drawn upon. There were side benefits of learning new words (ungulates?) and watching the English language evolve (house-blinging?). It felt like a craft.

Now few of my colleagues were interested in what I was doing day-to-day but that had the benefit of no-one else meddling with it. So my success or failure on any given day was down to me. There’s a certain pleasure in that.

I also, to a reasonable extent, built my career on it. My first presentations and published articles were all formed by insights from being immersed in the metadata systems. Other people were working in the same space but for the most part they weren’t the same people who were standing up at conferences and talking.

So find it boring, by all means. But there’s opportunities there for the taking.

We’re looking for a permanent senior IA, preferably someone with:

• In-depth knowledge of navigation design, metadata, content management and search systems
• Experience promoting IA through public speaking, writing, teaching or community events

Job description and how to apply at the BBC jobs website.

(Some proportion of the Future Media & Technology department is relocating to Salford in 2011. That might include this role but we don’t know for sure yet. )

from the Freakonomics blog in NYTimes:

while most industries are shedding jobs, consumer debt councilors, conservation consultants and green energy suppliers have ramped up hiring

Government and public sector won’t necessarily ‘ramp up’ hiring but the hiring managers may sigh in relief if the commercial sector stops ratcheting up salaries. Not that I’m wishing for a recession, of course.

I don’t often watch Dr Who so it was apt that when I did on Saturday (whilst fretting about how Pileswasp’s operation was going) it was set in a library. Or rather a library world:

Silence in the Library

In the midst of Jared Spool’s gadfly-esque “UCD never worked, maybe we should retire it” opening plenary at the IA Summit was a rope prop. The rope represented the number of visitors to a website. It had a knot to show the small percentage of visitors who are customers and another for the even smaller percentage of big spenders/ultra-fans. Jared suggests that a smart business person doesn’t worry about the huge percentage for whom the website clearly isn’t working and just focus on selling a little bit more to those ultra-fans.

Fair enough.

But oddly not everyone in audience is just trying to make lots of money. I was reminded of this in a recent presentation from the BBC’s marketing team about audience segmentation. Like any other organisation we have a segment of highly passionate fans but, as the presentation made clear, the BBC cannot just up-sell to our the high approvers. That’s not public service.

So BBC IAs have to think about the whole rope, I’m afraid.

One of the goals of personas is to challenge stereotypes and preconceptions. This worked nicely when we were working on persona creation for the redesign of bbc.co.uk.
The personas were all based on research from our audience research team but the team was questioning the pensioner profiles for using too much technology, complaining that “my gran is nothing like that”. This is when you have to point out that the pensioners AR were talking about were 65. That makes them most of my colleagues’ parents not our grandparents. And reminds us all we’re getting old.

The research was nicely validated by an interview we did a few weeks later with a recently retired librarian. She was using digital television (including catch-up TV), mobile phone (texting and taking photos), digital radio, PC (internet & email), digital camera & skype with a web-cam. She’s wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about technology but was heavily influenced by her children and her need to stay in touch with family elsewhere in the world.

But even when we’ve recalibrated our understanding of who pensioners are….it is still a common cliche to hear web workers challenge something complex in a product on the grounds that “my mum couldn’t use that”.

Now my mum and dad are retired computer programmers. They’re seriously old school. When I was a kid I played with abandoned punch-cards and that green bar printout paper. Dinner time conversations involved mainframes and COBOL. I thought this was all normal for grown-ups.

Given how extraordinarily geeky you needed to be in early days to get into programming, they’re probably more technically able than many of today’s geeks. So my mum could almost certainly use that. If she wanted to.

Now my sister… she thinks the rest of us Harvey’s are weird. She’s a much better touchstone for the real world.

We still have space to offer an IA work experience placement this summer, preferably July or early August.

You can get more information from the BBC work experience site or it might be simpler to read IA work experience on this site.