As one of my first projects at the BBC I led the development of the BBC's homepage leading the industry and our audience into a new personalized future. The page has proved enormously successful driving higher usage and deep engagement (over 30% of the audience personalise the page still to this day a year later).

The mobile team has taken the initiative to take this thinking to the mobile homepage, which makes a ton of sense to me. Mobile devices (including phones) are very very personal, (more than 90% of our mobile phones have personal A/V content (photos, videos, etc) on them. We carry them everywhere. To me this project is the beginning of a personalised, audience centred roadmap for the BBC, and a great step forward for the mobile service and team.

Ulyssa MacMillan, who leads the BBC Mobile Browser team, has written the blog below which I'd like to share with you today, I am immensely proud of her and the team with their hard work to get this service live!

Richard Titus is Future Media Controller, Audio and Music & Mobile, BBC Future Media & Technology

The Mobile browser team has developed a customisable mobile homepage and we're sharing it with you today so you can try it out and give us your feedback. It is currently in beta form linked from the main homepage. Over the next few weeks we will be adding new features, fixing issues and building in changes based on feedback until we are ready to remove the beta status and replace the current homepage at the end of March.

For best results, view full screen.

This is significant for everyone involved in developing mobile services for the BBC - the homepage is dynamic and it is served from Forge (the BBC's new dynamic web serving infrastructure), and it is the first milestone in an ambitious roadmap for the development of our service to be contextual, social, personal, immediate, device and location aware. Whilst complimenting bbc.co.uk, it will take into consideration the unique properties of Mobile and of the audience needs when they are on the go. We will build on the learning and experience of this project to reinvent BBC Mobile.

Features

- Customisation helps users surface their favourite areas from the site and access them directly from the homepage, Music, entertainment, News, Sport...
- It gives the ability to create a localised content set - News, Weather and TV schedules where you live.
- The homepage has a more live and up to date feel - with the latest schedule and iPlayer featured content (see end of mail for supported device details) as well as News, Sport and Entertainment top headlines.
- It takes advantage of a user's handset and network capabilities to give them the best possible experience - e.g. a different experience and image sizes for touch screens and iPlayer/audio and video if supported.

Functionality

- Reordering topics (news, sport, weather, entertainment, television, radio & music, featured sites) - Removing and/or adding topics to the homepage
- Setting and changing location
- Adding extra news and sport sections
- Changing the television/radio stations and schedules
- Saving the page (via cookies - if supported by your carrier)

Supported devices

iPhone, iPod Touch and Google Android; handsets running the Opera browser; all Nokia N Series and high-end Nokias; Sony Ericsson and Samsung running the Net Front 3.3+ browser; some Blackberry's 4.2+.

If you are unsure about whether your handset is supported, just give it a try. If you try to access the homepage on an unsupported handset you will be redirected back to the current homepage.

Accessing the homepage

Put the url www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/betahome/ into your phone or text BETAHOME to 88822. You will be charged 10p to 12p to send the text and it will not come from your text bundle. You may receive two different messages to ensure you have the best format for your handset but there will be no extra cost.

Future features/releases

This is only the first phase of our plans for the BBC mobile homepage.

While it's a vast improvement on the current offering, we'll continue to review the content, functionality and design, and we'll continue to listen to users about what they want to be able to do with their homepage.

We will give users the ability to customise the mobile homepage from a desktop PC, and in the future to share preferences across mobile and the fixed line where appropriate to do so. We will also introduce an element of implicit recommendation - telling users about more content they might be interested in that they may not be aware of - and bring a whole new audience to the content available.

We'll also widen the range of handsets and browsers supported, and build on our new dynamic device-intelligent architecture to offer the best possible experience, whether you are on a low end device or high end touch screen.

We are exploring ways of allowing users to add more content whilst being mindful of page weight - we will tie this into device detection too, so that handset capabilities are taken into consideration for the best experience possible. Adding favourite football teams and following the latest sports news and results direct from the homepage would be a really popular example of additional content, and we'll look at adding this option in the very near future.

If our users spend time and effort telling us about their favourite subjects and UK location, it makes sense for this to shape their experience across the whole BBC mobile site so we'll be looking to offer a more customised experience across other areas of the site too.

We'll also be looking at how to better surface the vast range of content on the site - mobile search, using dynamic navigation and links, and looking at how we can use location-based technology.

Users of our international site will also see their homepage change later this year - making it more customisable using the functionality we've developed for the new beta homepage.

We'd appreciate any feedback you have about the new homepage. We'd especially like to find out what you think of the functionality, user experience, design and the speed at which it loads on your phone. It's a little heavier than the current live homepage as it has more content in it. And if you have any other comments about the features you'd like to see on the homepage, we'd love to hear those too.

Ulyssa MacMillan is Executive Producer, BBC Mobile.

As you may have read in the press by now I've been promoted to a new role at the BBC; Future Media Controller, Audio & Music and Mobile.

My new remit includes a lot of the products and services I worked on extensively in my old role running User Experience. One of the most exciting projects I collaborated on with Matthew Postgate (former Controller of Mobile, now Controller Research & Innovation) was the BBC iPlayer on mobile. We launched the 1st version of this on the iPhone back in June; the second version was on the Nokia N96 which launched on 1 October.

We have just launched a new portal for BBC iPlayer on mobile which includes live TV and radio alongside our catch up services. This work was done with design agency Fjord collaborating with our internal design and technology teams. The portal is initially available on the Samsung Omnia and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 with the Sony Ericsson C905 by the end of next week. We will be extending the portal out to other compatible devices in the coming weeks.

Jon Billings, Head of Technology for Mobile for the BBC and a member of my new management team has written the blog below.

Richard Titus is Future Media Controller, Audio and Music & Mobile, BBC Future Media & Technology

December Mobile BBC iPlayer update - our new browser service.

We have just released a new mobile BBC iPlayer website in Beta.

The existing iPhone site and Nokia application will continue and the new site will complement them by providing a platform to support a wider range of mobile phones. The URL is still going to be www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer and our system will figure out which device you are on and will redirect you accordingly.

The new site has a familiar look, but actually introduces a new navigation and a few new features. It is organised in three main tabs - 'Catchup', 'TV' and 'Radio'. Catchup is where all the on demand content from the last 7 days can be found with sections for: featured, most popular, by genre and by channel; which is similar to the existing offering. The TV and Radio tabs offer access to 'Live' BBC TV & Radio, with a simple 'now and next' view of all channels.

Initially the new site will only support a couple of additional handsets - the Samsung Omnia and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 but this will continue to grow with the Sony Ericsson C905 due next week and more in the coming months (stay tuned for details). The Samsung Omnia and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 are Windows Mobile based - but this is a coincidence!

These phones have been selected as they hit our requirements of Wi-Fi and 3G support with great browsing and media playback experience (i.e. the video and audio look and sound good), and its also great to broaden our platform support out to Windows Mobile smartphones as well as our first feature phone offering on the C905.

The new site is built on the BBC's new PHP based dynamic web publishing platform.

This gives us more flexibility with respect to customising content to specific devices and so should allow us to reach a broader range of phone platforms than we can with the system we use for the iPhone & Nokia N96 offerings.

Here are some more technical details.

The new site uses the existing simulcast audio and video encodings from the Live TV & Radio site launched in October, and will use the existing TV on-demand encodings produced for the Nokia N96 widget. This brings me to a temporary deficiency in the new offering - the existing radio on-demand encodings aren't compatible with the devices we're supporting in the new site. We're working on producing new Radio on-demand encodings and we'll be adding them in just as soon as we can.

This month we have also added a parental guidance and protection facility which works by setting a PIN code. This feature builds on the content labelling/tick box for over sixteen's capabilities which were already in place.

Lastly, a brief update on the Nokia application - we're adding support immediately for the Nokia N85 and we're looking at one or two more future Nokia devices too. Feature wise, it'll be largely as for the existing N96 offering, with a few minor additions. Of course we won't just be restricting ourselves to just one manufacturer's devices; we are very keen to roll out further BBC iPlayer applications and widgets with other partners and we will continue to keep you informed on our progress.

It's been a busy month already and we are only half way through!

Jon Billings is Head of Technology, Mobile, BBC Future Media & Technology.

Earlier this year, some members of my team did some really great work into how people interact and behave with digital media. This work helped inform our work on BBC iPlayer and many of our other digital services we've launched. Adam Hutchinson has written about it below and also created an infographic which we've been repeatedly asked to share.

Click here for full-size [7.3 Mb JPEG]

Watching TV is more than just watching TV - how you need to understand people to create successful technology
by Adam Hutchinson

My job as an interaction designer in the BBC's User Experience & Design team is to ensure that BBC technology focuses on what our audience finds useful and enjoyable. To do this, we have to understand how people use media and what their needs are.

In early 2008, we studied how people find, play, personalise and share programmes across different devices and services - like BBC iPlayer, Sky+, YouTube, peer-to-peer and traditional TV and radio. We discovered what is important for people and what problems they face.

We asked ten members of the public around the country to take part in our study. They kept "media use" diaries for two weeks and were interviewed in their homes about their entertainment habits. We found that people watch TV or listen to the radio not for its own sake, but in order to achieve a range of goals - such as to relax, to keep up to date or to spend time with each other. This is not new. What we also saw was how these goals are being achieved in ways we didn't expect.

By paying attention to the activities that come before and after the watching or listening (like finding, personalising and sharing programmes), we learned a lot about what people find important. For example, a lot of people feel overwhelmed at the amount of choice there is. They skip through programmes or channels and don't settle on one, as they feel they could be missing out something else.

Another fascinating insight is how watching TV is an enabler for socialising. Gossiping about plotlines and being up to date with a programme is a form of social currency (eg "Did you see Heroes last night?"). What we often neglect to consider is that people like to watch programmes together. We saw how a group of teenage boys would watch Dragons' Den and try to impress each other with their business knowledge. If one of the friends had already seen the episode, they were barred from the discussion, because they could "cheat" as they knew what was going to happen.

Some people have enormous media collections, and take great pride in them. Often they won't listen to or watch everything in their collection because it's the collecting they enjoy. We were also surprised at how people mixed and matched old and new technologies to fit in with their lives. People who use the latest gadgets also go through the Radio Times magazine with a pen to plan their week's viewing - because that's the easiest way to do it. People who blog about music trends also burn CDs to give to their friends, because a physical object somehow means more than its digital equivalent.

Interesting stuff - but what next? Well, for me it gets really exciting when you take take our existing products and think about how we can improve them based on these insights. But the main message is: understand your audience and you'll understand what makes a product successful.

Included in this post is a rich picture that expresses some of these insights [7.3 Mb JPEG], and a link to a detailed findings poster [6.7 Mb JPEG]. Thanks to Jamie Hill who planned and ran this project, the team of researchers from BBC User Experience & Design, and Flow Interactive who helped with the analysis.

I ended my speech, which ranged from an overview of the evolution of user interaction models on technology to cloud computing and the semantic web, with a picture of the Google search window...

...and the statement:

All this innovation, and yet this is the best we can currently do for content discovery: brute force text search. We have to do better if we want to evolve.

Okay, it was for dramatic effect, but I believed then and believe now that I was absolutely accurate.

Search is one of the darkest backwaters of technological and experience development (particularly on the internet.) Since then, I've been thinking a lot about how we, the BBC, can improve search on our site, and how we can drive innovation around search in general in the industry.

Earlier this month, there were a couple of really interesting launches in the world of search.

Yahoo! is clearly Number Two, but since it's a marginally zero sum game in terms of monetisable search traffic, it needs a different way to take market share. "Embrace and extend", indeed.

This was followed almost immediately by Cuil, a Xoogle (ex-Google employee company - more about that later) which launched to much fanfare, and mostly collapsed into a mess of unmet audience expectations - always risky.

Frankly, I haven't played with it enough to make a decision, but it wasn't nearly as compelling as the rest of those mentioned in this post.

I was lucky enough to join Jane Weedon, our controller of business development, on a trip to Asia and to the USA to do some learning about small, young innovative companies and market trends.

In the realm of "oh my god, that looks like rocket science", we file Viewdle. Essentially, it's an image search engine with facial recognition software.

Born in the Ukraine out of what I suspect was a largely military development effort, the technology is funded by Anthem, a SoCal VC and frankly, after a thirty minute demo, I was blown away.

See for yourself at reuters.viewdle.com/searchm. I'm keen to spend more time on this, and feel like there's an unknown number of ways to leverage this.

One of my favourite meetings from Asia was Naver, the Korean search giant owned by the largest online gaming portal in Korea (another interesting space for a blog).

With near 80% market share in Korea (Google has less than 4%!), 16m people visit Naver every day. They have managed to capture and data cache the majority of Korean language content on the internet.

Now, to my non-Korean-speaking western eye, this is a confusing, hard-to-understand site, but there are some really keen innovations here:

• They mix different kinds of results into an answer, presenting only relevant ones
• Their scrap tool (sort of like social bookmarking à la digg or delicious) allows users to copy parts of one blog or site onto another, helping to grow the interconnectedness of the interweb and building relevance
• Behind Naver is an engine of editorial staff who review
• They have a Google Answers- or Yahoo! Knowledge-like offer which helps to identify new subjects and content to deep dive on
• Other than the aforementioned editorial staff, which is outsourced to low-cost centres like China, the company is run by a team of just over 80 people who are amazingly innovative and agile
• They also have JR Naver kids' search

Interestingly, US-based Mahalo lists Naver as its biggest inspiration. They have duplicated the Naver editorial model, but built it up into an amazing engine of content discovery and improvement.

Mahalo creates pages about selected subjects using its amazing editorial/ curation team which is distributed around the world . Their page curators, who come from all walks of life - professors, doctors, homemakers - create the pages for a nominal sum (under fifty quid) per page. It's a model similar to Wikipedia, but managed (ie, you have to demonstrate your skills and you are evaluated regularly to assess the quality of your work).

It is an interesting alternative to the approach taken by Daylife and others (including the BBC with its Topic Pages - previously blogged here) where pages are produced automatically using search queries to find and aggregate content. This is obviously cheaper and computers can find much more content than human editors ever could. But Mahalo's pages have a hand-built quality that can only be produced by skilled editors and well thought out workflows.

Co-founder and CEO (and a long-time friend of mine) Jason Calcanis talks about how this makes his content more "trusted"; which I think is a really interesting concept.

His new line, which I'll repeat here, is that trust is one of the most important currencies/assets in the digital future. Frankly, I'd put it up there with metadata.

Digital has a function of changing the nature and assets in the future. Attention, data and trust, rather than cash and inventory: brave new world, indeed.

Mahalo is a Sequoia investment. I was lucky enough, with some colleagues from the BBC and Sony, to attend a Sequoia open day in SF. It's essentially a beauty parade by the VC of their best and brightest (and most relevant) investments for larger strategic or VIP friends and family.

One of the most compelling things they showed us was SearchMe, which I was quite impressed by. Essentially, it's a combination of a new search engine (built by Xooglers) with a new, Flash-based interface.

Now, the interface borrows heavily from Apple's interaction pattern library and it's a bit clunky for browsing, but it is quite striking.

I find that it's also really good at predicting what I'm looking for, with a few exceptions. I see pieces of the old snap search engine (the creative director, Jason Fields, just joined us at the BBC) as well as X1 (long may it live - one of the most useful tools ever).

Frankly, however, it really shone when they loaded up the Searchme Ap on my iPhone. Oh MY GOD! WOW. Extremely compelling search on a phone (it replaces the internal search and I don't miss it a bit.)

I'm converted, though they need some slightly better browse mechanisms (see what Apple did in the newest version of iTunes.)

Cuil has some interesting visual metaphors as well: the blue type, minimalist and frankly ugly and not very usable Google UX seems to be crumbling!

I really think that the next two years will be defined by those of us who can really raise the efficiency of discovery (both targeted - ie, I know what I want, and browsing/snacking - ie, I'm looking for something stimulating).

When you marry solid data and indexing (everyone forgets that Google's code base is almost ten years old), useful new datapoints (facial recognition, behavioral targeting, historical precedent, trust, etc) with a compelling and useful user experience, we may see some changes in the market leadership of search.

Richard Titus is Controller, User Experience & Design for BBC Future Media & Technology.

--Lionel Trilling, Esquire, Sept 1964, quoting Eliot^†

The fine line between your influences and outright plagiarism is getting finer indeed.

In the music world, people are mashing up music from previously made recordings, performing and "reinterpreting" other artists' work: Danger Mouse's Grey Album and artists like Nouvelle Vague, Richard Cheese and many others have demonstrated this to phenomenal effect.

So when my team in user experience and design started seeing other groups building sites which were similar to, inspired by, or in one case a borderline copy of the BBC homepage, (SSIs and all), they waited to see what the Yank from the land of litigious copyright lawyers would do (that's me, by the way).

Frankly, I found myself - as did most of the team - mildly flattered, and even challenged.

Composite image by Ryan Morrison

The first site I saw was the Croatian site. I thought: "Wow, from a design standpoint that's quite similar to ours - there are some interesting tweaks as well." A week or so later, I saw the RTL Hungary site. Seeing these two, so close in time, I found myself quite intrigued.

I believe inspiration can come from a variety of sources. Some of the inspiration for the BBC homepage included a diverse array of sites across the web, but I wonder what Google, Pageflakes, Facebook and CNN think about BBC.co.uk/home.

I know what Netvibes thinks about it: co-founder and CEO Tariq Kim and I talked about it extensively.

He felt our adoption of a similar experience/interaction model to Netvibes and Pageflakes (his arch-rival) simply helped to demonstrate the real impact of widgets, modular content delivery, rss/xml and personalisation. "A rising tide lifts all boats" was essentially his message.

I agree with him. Each iteration of a technology and/or approach creates new opportunities to innovate (or riff, if we are still using musical terms) on that idea with one of your own. In many ways, the BBC's adoption of Web 2.0 thinking, personalisation and widgets helped to break down barriers at other organisations. Audience desire for personalisation was estimated as a niche offer before the BBC demonstrated that +30% (+50% of the beta) of our unique users personalise their experience in some way. To me, this audience engagement is the real success story of the homepage.

Here are a few facts about personalisation of the new BBC homepage:

• +30% of global unique users personalise it in some way
• Most popular module combinations and positions:
    (1) News + Weather + Sport + TV + CBBC + Radio + iPlayer + Blogs
    (2) News + Weather+ Sport + TV + CBBC + Radio
• Most added / opened modules:
    (1) News
    (2) Sport
    (3) Blogs
• Most deleted / minimised modules:
    (1) CBBC
    (2) News
    (3) Sport

One of the most popular positioning changes is swapping Sport for News. Here are the default and most popular customization positions:

• removing the blogs module and the iPlayer module
• opening the CBBC module, and moving it into the second column
• TV at top of column 2 (chicken and egg here - I don't know whether users moved down weather, leaving TV to go up "naturally", or vice versa)
• Moving the weather module down to the bottom of row 2 and minimising it

Remember, these are international figures. iPlayer, Radio and TV aren't as relevant to many of those audiences - but the figures are still fascinating. News and sport seem to be very polarising elements of the BBC's offering; our children's content is likely most interesting if you are or have a child! And due to licensing restrictions, BBC iPlayer is only available/useful in the UK.

We're collecting lots of really great data from the homepage and trying to use them to inform our choices for things to improve and things that work well and, across the BBC, to assess new editorial offerings.

But back to the influences and copies. On the whole, I'm flattered that someone thought what we have done to be important enough to influence their work. It means that we've done something important, or at least opened some people's minds somewhat. Mary Meeker, a financial analyst in the US, said that she was surprised that, of all the media companies in the world, it was the BBC that innovated so clearly into the personalised audience-engaged homepage.

But my friends at news organisations apparently discuss our homepage a lot. Even TechCruch's Michael Arrington talked about it on US television. Maybe we've demonstrated demand for something many of them didn't really expect would be compelling: an opinion I suspect they are reconsidering.

I've travelled and even lived quite extensively in Eastern Europe, including Hungary, and I was blown away by the depth of knowledge and passion around internet technology there. So the fact that web developers from two different Eastern European countries - both with healthy web development and IT and design communities - picked us as a primary influence on their work to revamp media portals says to me that we've done something right.

Some of their peers berated them for their work, but I say: thanks! There are times when the BBC lawyers must defend the BBC's rights for all kinds of good reasons, but my personal opinion is that these examples help to drive creativity and innovation in a way that we should embrace.

I've always felt that design, software and music have a lot in common. When musicians jam, they sit around and riff off each other. They write songs together collaboratively, in the room, each inspiring the other to take it to a new interesting place. Other times, you get an idea in your head from the session, but go home and end up personalising it, composing it into a complete tune and making it your own. We each take our inspiration from many things, so to lock up creativity and ideas is to me the biggest danger of copyright law.

Frankly, on a personal level, I've always given my ideas away, often for free or with little or no compensation. My lawyer friends make fun of this, but I feel most ideas are ephemeral. It's the hard work of iterating them into something truly useful and refining, and revamping again and again that's the art, the science and the fun.

There is something else to point out about the homepage - something that most of the sites also picked up on and then used in some way. The code.

Behind the amazing design the User Experience team developed for the homepage is some amazing, well crafted code delivered by the our CSD team (in record time, I might add - less than four months from idea to delivery!). As is always the case with good code, it is invisible to the user - technology as a means not an end.

However, the code which powers the homepage, with its SSIs and legacy Perl issues, is really some pretty amazing stuff. It just works: it's clean, fast and accessible and the user doesn't even know that it's there. At the BBC, we are currently working on code libraries (like our Glow library, which will be used in the forthcoming new beta homepage) and public-facing design and code pattern libraries.

This is publicly funded work and, where there is a clear benefit to the public, let's try to make it available to the public to personalise and to make their own. Perhaps we can eventually evolve this into an open source code library - we already have BBC Open Source where we release material like this. In my humble opinion, this is a great expression of our public purpose and, frankly, an interesting thing to do.

In closing, I'll share my favourite of the sites which bear uncanny similarities to our homepage. It uses quite a bit of our amazing code - it's for Little Ilford School in East London. Next generation education indeed.

Richard Titus is Acting Head of User Experience & Design for FM&T.

^† Editors' note: This saw is from TS Eliot's The Sacred Wood: Essays On Poetry & Criticism (1922; see below), but has been mashed up into various other forms, including the title of a Morrissey compilation and attributed to many well-known and impressive-sounding figures (including, as is the case for all maxims, Oscar Wilde).

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. [cited in full at Bartleby]

Organised by portfolio, the wall soon became what could only be described as a collage of confusion, a display of conflicting designs and user journeys all of which depicted various epochs of innovation. More importantly, many of them weren’t even clearly branded as part of the BBC’s digital offering.

Additionally, the way that our audience would journey between these systems was and in many cases remains quite challenging and difficult. People can’t always find what they are looking for, couldn’t play media efficiently (almost 187 different media players were/are in use currently) nor could they share our content with others, discouraging our audience from being our biggest distributor.

In six short months we have taken major steps to solve some of these issues, creating a consistent navigation and look and feel now being deployed across the site, making the homepage useful & personalisable, creating a single embedded media player (EMP as we call it) with a single ingest and distribution infrastructure.

Notice the same EMP on both the Programme pages, News pages (soon with consistent standardized Share functionality) and the streaming iPlayer itself!

Lastly, but likely most significantly (and controversially) the new homepage - which was launched a few weeks ago, and announced by my creative director; Bronwyn Van der Merwe .

To those of you who say (like John Smales) “Why change it if it isn’t broken?” I'd make the following points:

Secondly, there’s a tour and FAQ on the homepage which I recommend all of you take a few minutes to experience, a link to which you’ll find in the top right hand corner of the page. The majority of comments I’ve seen are already addressed either there or in previous blogs.

Thirdly, arguing about aesthetics is like singing about traffic. It’s not only ineffective, but it’s in large part not very pleasurable.

Lastly on the topic of measuring audience response:

Suffice to say that if we relied solely on blog comments on this page to do our market, audience, usability and accessibility research we would truly not be doing our jobs.

This blog is one of the variety of tools we can use to gauge response, but it is only one of them; and not really representative of the audience of BBC.co.uk.

The BBC has undertaken a variety of consumer research efforts around the changes we are making to it’s interactive offers, they have all come back remarkably positive. Change often instigates adverse reactions but what I’m quite keen to learn is the underlying audience demands and where we’re meeting them and where we can improve. Balancing these with the business and strategic goals of the BBC is one of the biggest challenges of my role.

Here's a selection of comments I want to respond to directly:

Brendan comments that “The new website has less information on the page”:

I’ve attached an overlay image here so you can see that there is far more information on this page now than there ever was before. Since it’s personalisable, you can have everything you ever wanted from the page, and eliminate much of what you didn’t!

More importantly, much more of this information is content, rather than blind links to various areas of the site you could have just as easily bookmarked, adding greater value & utility to the audience.

While it’s unlikely you would include every widget, maximised, we’ve made available a wide selection. 60% of you have chosen to personalise the site, we know we’ve satisfied a previously unmet audience demand.

“Screen size, page weight, etc.”:

As mentioned in a previous blog, our research shows us that the vast majority of our audience are coming to the site with 1024x768 resolution. Thus we decided to increase the screen real estate. In comparison with sites of similar stature or usage (Yahoo, MSN, CNN, Sky, LastFM, netvibes, etc.) we remain quite conservative and have one of the best performance ratios (size vs content) of any media company, content portal or news site.

“The feature box “

There has always been a feature box on the home page, this hasn’t changed in five years.

We have expanded the image because we have expanded the page… while I think an interesting idea might be to allow customisable sizes for the feature (an idea we’re punting around as I write this) the idea of the promo is not new. I find it interesting so many focus on this issue, I’ll point you to James Price, and invite him to blog again about this area.

Many have discussed James' position to keep this as a fixed piece of content on the homepage.

I tend to agree with him. The reason you would choose the BBC homepage rather than pageflakes or netvibes would be because you felt that there was something inherently beneficial about our content and editorial choices.

Interesting user feedback we’ve taken on board:

“Web Search”:

The volume of feedback on this feature which did not make the transition from the old homepage frankly caught us by surprise. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft as well as browsers such as Firefox and Opera have a search bar built into their browsers. In our user testing and our own experience this feature felt outdated and unnecessary, given the superiority of the other products to the limited functionality of our offering.

However, on the strength of your feedback e.g comments like this one from Jane Skinner, I’ve asked the team to re-examine this feature (i.e. websearch) either as our first off BBC widget or to return it to the search bar. Keep a eye out for that.

“External widgets”

This is a hot topic amongst our team. One of the key challenges of the BBC homepage is that it must be compelling, useful and accessible to over 30m unique users. This is extremely hard to accomplish both from a design and a user experience perspective. There are also standards of quality for content and functionality.

Some of our users indicated they’d like to have a widget to check their gmail accounts for example, or incorporate content from other sites into the homepage. The editorial team is considering these options as we speak and I look forward to seeing this idea evolve if the demand is there. Please comment here if there are external widget feeds (flickr, gmail, search?) you’d like to see.

The new homepage has also raised the bar for accessibility; setting new standards which I hope will become the new benchmark across BBC digital services.

Making our content & services available to as large as an audience as possible is an area of professional and personal passion of mine. Jonathan from my team has blogged on this topic and we have received kudos from the audience as well.

It’s been just over ½ a year since I joined the BBC, the energy here and collaborative environment, particularly here in User Experience & Design, are amazing.

None of products or services I’ve mentioned is a “ship and forget”. All of them are constantly iterating parts of our digital service, evolving to meet requirements, needs and goals of both the audience & the BBC.

As my colleagues here and in the blogosphere say, “still more to come!”

Richard Titus is Controller, User Experience and Design, BBC Future Media & Technology.

At the end of my first post I asked you for your comments and promised to engage in a conversation. I expected maybe a dozen or so replies. So imagine my astonishment when, as of this morning, more than 280 + of you have taken time to give us your views and criticisms on the new betahomepage.

This level of engagement is exactly why I came to the BBC. The generally positive nature of the feedback was even more wonderful. The success of the web as a media platform has been driven by its ability to rapidly connect people and ideas. Delivering a better BBC homepage must be based on a lively and frank conversation with our audience, so thank you for keeping up your side!

The team and I have been reviewing the feedback over the past few days, from the original post, the wider blogosphere and the feedback form on the home page.

Despite some unconstructive, or should I say, 'personal' responses, ("yankee go home" was my favourite) I am delighted that so many of you have taken time out to explore the new page and tell us what you think.

Some of the key points...

Customisation and Personalisation

One of the fundamental challenges you raised was the philosophy behind our introduction of customization and personalization (as I'm a Yank, please note my use of the Z in personalization rather than personalisation. it seemed disingenuous of me to change to an s when I so prefer the letter z).

Some suggested this indicates that the BBC no longer has a voice or knows what it wants to say. I disagree.

Customization is about collaborating with our audience. As a linear broadcast medium, the web is no better and in many ways far worse than other mediums. The web's power comes from several key strengths...

Its ability to give us what we want, when we want it

Its ability to create a conversation where previously there was only one voice or one point of view

Its ability to enrich the user's experience by tracking, collecting, archiving and leveraging information about their activities, tastes and preferences

Clearly there are privacy issues here, and I plan to expand on these in detail in a forthcoming post (essentially, it's about user knowledge, consent and trust).

But as several of you have suggested, our aim is to grow and develop the technology and user experience to move from the current, primarily active personalization you experience on the new home page to passive and suggestive personalized experiences (where the software does more of the work for you).

All of these strengths place the audience at the centre of what we do, giving them choices and listening to them when they make those choices. Success for us here is dependent on giving individuals info they need and want to know, in an accessible and interesting way.

It's worth noting that the customisation is an opt-in activity. The default version of the page which is delivered to every user is an editorially curated window into the BBC which has, I believe, a clear voice and hierarchy of information.

Feature image and box

Another key area of the homepage which has generated controversy was the feature image and area of the site.

First of all, this area is a piece of rich editorial content created and updated several times a day under the guidance of James Price, the editor of the Homepage and his team. Its role is to showcase the best the BBC has to offer with stand-alone packages of entertainment and information.

Conceptually, the feature existed on the original homepage, albeit in a smaller and less visually striking format. We have increased both it's size and the entire page size on the basis that:

99.8% of our users have a screen set at 800px or wider

45.2% of our users have a screen set at 1280px or wider

So I think you can see why we decided to move to 1024 as our standard.

A feature I'm particularly fond of is the way the image breaks out of its frame. Again, we're not in a print medium, so things can come alive. The design and platform of the feature region will support Flash, slide-shows, animation and even video. The video uses the new pan-bbc embedded media player just unveiled in iPlayer, which will grant my brethren from linux and mac entry to the wonderful world of iPlayer. Go there now and try it!

The new design gives the homepage editorial team a sound and visually enticing platform to present feature stories & images. I'm hopeful that the homepage team will outline their vision for the feature in a forthcoming blog post.

Colour Changes

The decision to have the colours change based on clicks on the boxes in the bottom of the feature area seems to have been a real hot-button for many of you, as is the decision to move away from a "fixed palette". After extensive user research we learned that people were tired of a monochromatic blue site ("its been blue for five years for God's sake" was one quote).

The colour change feature is an homage to what we thought was one of the most innovative features of Andrew Bank's original 2002 redesign. From the feedback here it would appear that our concerns were justified as many of you obviously weren't aware of the colour change function in the original page. Colours are there to support the editorial and create an aesthetically pleasing environment. Also, it's a beta, and as many of our testers young and old said "its fun!"

In keeping with your feedback, this colour change on click functionality is likely to evolved into either an editorial or user choice, or perhaps both. We welcome additional thoughts on this idea.

Clicks & clocks

Wow! "The Clock" really seems to be a love/hate thing. But the loves seem to outnumber the hates 10-1 according to our initial unofficial research. For those of you who are concerned about the accuracy of the timing, we are looking at making it more 'time accurate'

Adding & removing content

If you click the customize your homepage button you'll find quite a few choices there (selecting them adds or subtracts this content from the page). We are aware of the issues around the contents' automatic drop into the left-hand column and are working to improve this.

Radio & TV personalization

More feedback here will help us focus on the feeds that are important to you, so tell us what you'd like to have. There were some excellent suggestions here which we are already exploring.

Feeds & content choices

Please be patient, more are in the pipeline. These include technology feeds, refined local feeds and specialized sports feeds and applications such as the recipes search. The editorial content strategy is the domain of the homepage editorial team. Please continue making suggestions as I know they value your input.

Our goal is to enable our audience to find, play or share the best of what the BBC has on offer. We will continue to refine the experience, and have enjoyed and been overwhelmed by your response. The BBC homepage will always have to satisfy a very disparate group of individual users and functions, but there is one piece of common ground. All users want a clear route into the content which interests, entertains or enlightens them.

Thanks to all of you who have joined this conversation. I hope all of you will continue to help transform the BBC homepage to truly reflect its landmark domain name, in both form and function. Please do leave comments here and we'll carry on talking in the new year.

And to all of you Merry Christmas!

(You may also find James Thornett's post about the 2011 BBC Homepage beta of interest - inserted Ian McDonald 21 Sep 2011)

I joined the Beeb after moving to the UK with my wife just over a year ago. I needed a fresh challenge and was excited to be part of a truly world-renowned media company with a public service remit which makes it 100% user-focussed. For me, the BBC is one of the last great important places.

So when the BBC's Internet Controller Tony Ageh suggested - or, should I say, vehemently recommended - that we give the BBC homepage a "lick of paint", it seemed the ideal way to get my head around the BBC and its immense universe of content and services.

We drew inspiration for the new page from a variety of sources.

It was a no-brainer to move to a layout that would be cleaner, more open and more easily readable. There was also a desire to get away from the tired and monotonous blue base colour of the original page.

From a conceptual point of view, the widgetization adopted by Facebook, iGoogle and netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking. We wanted to build the foundation and DNA of the new site in line with the ongoing trend and evolution of the Internet towards dynamically generated and syndicable content through technologies like RSS, atom and xml. This trend essentially abstracts the content from its presentation and distribution, atomizing content into a feed-based universe. Browsers, devices, etc therefore become lenses through which this content can be collected, tailored and consumed by the audience.

This concept formed one of the most important underlying design and strategic elements of the new homepage. The approach has the added benefit of making content more accessible, usable, and more efficient to modify for consumption across a wider array of networks and devices.

Keep an eye out for incremental improvements as the homepage continues to evolve.

The key features of the homepage are:

• Simple, clean and beautiful, the final design, we hope, is visually striking yet unpretentious. The masthead showcases the BBC's new online branding.
• Personalization: you can choose the content that interests you by adding and removing the content boxes via the "Customise Your Homepage" tab. This allows the user to edit the type of information they'd like to appear. Soccer fans (pardon me - football fans), for example, can now add up to eight football stories to the sports box. The user can also create their own page layout by rearranging the boxes in the layout of their choice.
• Localization: Users can now set their own location, enabling them to access local sites, weather, news, radio and TV schedules without the hassle often associated with user journeys to local content. (Talking about the weather: as a newly emigrated Yank, I failed to grasp the gravity of the national controversy around the weather icons. I feel they are a massive improvement on those of the previous homepage, and in keeping with BBC tradition, we'll continue to refine them based on user feedback.)
• Simplicity: the customization is intuitive and includes an interactive demo and tips to guide users through the process. It is also unobtrusive - if the user has no desire to customize their page their experience won't be compromised. TV and radio schedules show what's on air now and on tonight and allow users to listen live directly from the homepage. There are also links to the most popular On Demand shows for each radio network.
• Search: The site is much easier to read and scan at a glance. At the top of the page there's a search function (now reduced from two search boxes to one), and at the bottom a full directory of all BBC sites and a link to the A-Z, allowing users to quickly find what they're looking for. You can refine your search by shrinking the field to just news and sport, or audio/video. Users who simply want to be entertained can choose one of the four main tabs to focus on a particular promotion of interest.
• Nostalgia: the new homepage also manages to incorporate eccentricity alongside innovation, and integrates a BBC 1 analogue clock in the top right corner. This feature was initially punted as a bit of fun, but feedback revealed that users find this icon, a homage to the "golden days" of analogue programming, bizarrely reassuring.

This version is called a "lick of paint" because it hasn't massively changed the content of the homepage. But it reflects, I hope, how the BBC is changing: it helps to empower the user to find, play and share more of what they want, when they want.

By adopting a collaborative and flexible approach it has taken less than three months for the new homepage to come to fruition. The response to our internal beta testing has been overwhelmingly positive.

The redesign is part of an ongoing conversation with our audience. Forthcoming services and the new page composition layer will deliver further visual refinement and personalization.

For now, all this customization is saved in a cookie, but from January we hope - with the launch of Identity - to incorporate this data into your unique personal user profile. The New Year will bring more treats including video on the homepage and an iPlayer widget. In short: watch this space.

While the site is currently in beta, I hope you'll opt in and click over to check out the new homepage, spend some time on it, personalize your experience, and take a moment to leave a comment here or to click the feedback box in the upper right of the homepage.

This page is the beginning of a conversation between the BBC and you about the page; I hope that you'll join us, as all conversations are better with an honest open dialogue.

A bientôt alors.

Richard Titus is Acting Head of User Experience & Design.

The BBC Homepage Team - a special thanks:

• Bronwyn van der Merwe - Art Director
• Anthony Heath - Project Manager
• Fraser Pearce - Tech Lead
• Laurence Wheway - Development Producer
• James Price - HP Editor
• Ben Gammon - Concept Developer and Lead Designer
• Alex Green - Designer
• Amelia Still - Usability
• Mark Gledhill - SSE
• Jez Burgoin - SE
• David Scott - SE
• Tom Cartwright - CSD
• Richard Hodgson - CSD
• Claire Roberts - CSD
• Paul Blake - CSD
• Ben Jeffreys - CSD
• Karen Loasby - IA
• Vicky Buser - IA
• Peter Houghton - Tester
• Stefanie Noell - Ops CSD
• The CMC team
• The editorial team

One of my first memories of the BBC was as a child on my first trip to London. We stayed at a hotel in Piccadilly, a magical place for a young man from California, drank sugary watered-down tea and, due to jetlag, woke up and slept odd hours - which meant we were allowed to watch television whenever we awoke.

The BBC clock, the history of which you can learn more about at Andrew Wiseman's Television Room, is a memory which stuck with me from that first trip to the UK. I didn't yet know what the BBC was, but the clock signified to me the wonderful, eccentric strange place that England represented. It signified James Bond, Mary Poppins and all the best bits of CS Lewis.

This year is the tenth anniversary of the BBC's presence on the internet; it's a time of celebration of the past and of proud steps into the future. Watch for the return of the clock - a piece of the entire BBC audience's childhood - in a few weeks...

Update 2008-02-29: Alan Connor of this parish has written about the clock for the BBC News Magazine.

Richard Titus is Acting Head of User Experience & Design, BBC Future Media & Technology. Many thanks to Gary August of BBC Heritage for the photo.