Live experience in iPlayer

The BBC is the home of big events. Whether it's the Olympic flame being lit, a music legend walking onto to the pyramid stage at Glastonbury or a late FA Cup goal – the BBC is the place to go when you can't go in person. With the product slowly evolving, how can we improve the live experience in the process? Oh – and btw, it's less than a month before Wimbledon and Glastonbury. Pressure! This project shows the part I played in bringing this live experience to the user, which helped to bag a UXUK Best Experience award in 2019.

With only a short amount of time until the events started, this projected needed good communication and involvement of stakeholders from the start. I was part of the design sprint team where we collaborated with people across the business. I helped shape and select the ideas from the groups in the design sprints. It was important that we had clarity early on in this project. I helped us to understand what we needed to start exploring in more detail.

A group of people evaluating ideas pinned to a wall - everyone appears to be in deep thought

iPlayer is a multi-platform product, and it’s important that experiences have equal merit. To do this, I brought together the designers from all platforms to create wireframes based off the direction the design sprint had taken us in.

Four designers eagerly working through the wireframes depicting the outcome of the design sprint

This wireframes were important because they gave all the disciplines material to focus their conversations around. We could quickly begin to understand what could be challenging to deliver in such a short timescale.

This is such an interesting topic of discussion. I believe that not everybody uses each platform the same, so it was really interesting to see how the idea was beginning to shape up across the different screens.

Mockups of the wireframes shown on each platform, mobile, TV and responsive web

As I was leading the mobile experience, I had to accommodate for a different set of users. TV platform is the biggest screen in the house, desktops and laptops are often used when the audience might not own a TV, or doesn’t have the approval of the people they live with to watch on the big screen.

Mobile has a completely different audience, and so, the experience had to be considered differently.

I collaborated with the Design Research team to get straight to the audience. We went to local tennis clubs in Manchester to test our ideas for an updated Wimbeldon experience. This was a great way to get early feedback from those with a keen interest in the upcoming live events.

An image showing a reserved sign with a prototype for a new live experience on the TV in the background

An image of the Northern tennis club in Didsbury, Manchester

I also coordinated formalised lab-based user testing with a specific audience to test our ideas even further. These insights helped me to make some key decisions when showing the experience on iPlayer’s homepage on the mobile platform.

From the research, I understood what we needed to create to improve the experience and deliver something which meets the expectation of our audience. But I wanted to push this another step further. I worked with the other designers who were creating the TV and Desktop experiences to suggest how we might improve on our original ideas further.

I had also learnt from the research that the designs were working for Glastonbury and Wimbledon in this instance. But there were many comments around how this might work for other types of events. The idea of introducing different levels of promience and hierarchy on the homepage was introduced. It was important we I could still focus the team on what we needed to deliver in the short term for this project, whilst also painting a picture for the rest of the team about the potential for this to be re-used in the future.

There were three different agile teams all working to deliver this new experience across all of the different platforms. This needed plenty of coordination between the designers, but also with the project managers. I helped to facilitate this conversation to make sure that what we were delivering in the UX teams was consistent across each platform. I could also understand where each team was at. Helping to join dots between colleagues to solve problems along the way.

The results showed that on the previous events, I had helped improve the overall engagement with Glastonbury and Wimbledon on previous years. It’s astonishing to see how many people come to iPlayer to view these live events. Even more astonishing to see how many more millions of people had engaged since improving the live experiene. I was glad to be part of the team which could surface this amazing content within the product and help get it infront of the audience.

I was also honoured to be part of the team which won the UXUK award for Best User Experience 2019.