For the past five years BBC Children’s & Education have been building interactive games and experiences with JavaScript and HTML5. This enables us to ship games to any platform with a modern web runtime. We work with agencies to commission new games and experiences for the many brands that we have.

We have around 300+ games, some of which are distributed via our five mobile apps on iOS and Android and others are embedded across www.bbc.co.uk.

We optimise ourselves around being cross-platform. Designing our organisational structure to make bringing new content into our portfolio as painless as possible, and good value for money.

We maintain multiple in-house game engines. These enable agencies to build various different game mechanics effortlessly with varying fidelities, whilst building abstractions and delivery pipelines so the games can be delivered to multiple platforms rapidly.

Delivering these HTML5 games to the web is fairly straightforward. We fetch the content from S3 and pop it into the DOM, each game shares a common API interface that is configured at runtime, allowing the host platform to inject its own implementations of libraries and config. This allows our game developers to focus on building the game and not the underlying mechanics of how our web and app platforms work.

Games on the web can start utilising modern new browser features like Service Workers, Web Workers, and Progressive Web Apps to deliver more and more optimised experiences relatively easily.

However, delivering web games into app stores isn’t as straightforward as “popping it into an app shell”, though.

In a series of blog posts, the Children’s and Education team are going to outline how we rapidly develop web content for app stores and beyond using modern web technologies on a platform dubbed the “Universal App Platform”.

What came before?

Around five years ago, when the business was first facing the challenge of shipping HTML5 content onto iOS and Android stores, many of the options that existed were fairly immature. Tooling like PhoneGap and Cordova were only just materialising, and client-side libraries like React were not as popular at the time. Web standards were growing but there was no concept of a Progressive Web App yet and browser capabilities like Service Workers did not exist.

Back then, putting web content into apps was a hostile environment. Shipping onto app stores was typically considered a problem that could only be solved well by experienced native app developers.

This platform complexity, coupled with immature frameworks and the business requirement to ship web apps to app stores, led us to spinning up an internal engineering team to create a proprietary app wrapping framework. This framework would be capable of bundling HTML5 web content and generating iOS and Android binaries from that content.

We called this framework Pick’n’Mix.

Pick’n’Mix provided a heap of functionality to its embedded web content, including the ability to download and store remote content from a CDN to disk, UI overlays for app settings and download management, analytics events, push notification support, and many other features. This functionality was built from scratch and solely maintained by our internal native engineering team.

Fundamentally, Pick’n’Mix was a WebView/WKWebView with a JS “bridge” capable of passing messages between content running within the WebView to trigger certain actions on the web/native side. This bridge was a “standard” we maintain internally called the Games Messaging Interface (or GMI). This GMI ensures that games are interoperable between many platforms and abstracts away the nuances from game developers of having to worry about the runtime.

You might expect to see methods such as getConnectivity, setConnectivityCallback, download, onSettings, getSettings, setMotionSettings on the GMI.

A high-level look at the Architecture of Pick’n’Mix:

From a product perspective, our apps can be split into two distinctive parts:

1. The Menu system where users can browse the catalogue of games and experiences they are able to download and interact with
2. The Content items themselves

Content items are typically cross-platform and built in the browser and deployed to both the BBC website and Pick’n’Mix.

Menu systems, however, were only needed in the app deployable to enable discoverability of content. This meant that menus were built exclusively for Pick’n’Mix and as such we historically required the engineers building menu systems to develop, test, and deliver the menus as fully-fledged ‘Pick’n’Mix’ apps. A very closely coupled integration. This is an important nuance; we were asking engineers to deliver us HTML5 content to run exclusively on a proprietary platform.

To support this, we had to provide means for engineers to test and develop their menus within Pick’n’Mix itself, adding a “development harness” to the pile of proprietary things we’re having to build and maintain ourselves. This nuance cuts even deeper - though, by requiring HTML5 apps to be delivered to a proprietary set of standards, we were moving further and further away from new and emerging web standards. This meant we were unable to take advantage of fantastic resources like MDN, and fundamentally in a position where 80% of the underlying runtime had to be supported by us.

The web is an amazing thing; it can turbocharge your ability to get things done and ship content anywhere, but it’s flexible too, making it easy to box yourself into a corner of unsustainable bespoke implementations, before you know it your once esoteric requirement is a web standard.
Pick’n’Mix was monolithic, it was a semantically versioned framework that every app had to depend on and bundle itself into. Pick’n’Mix did not stipulate how apps should build themselves, none of our apps were running on the same version of Pick’n’Mix and each time an app needed to take a new version upgrades were laborious and expensive from a development and testing perspective.

Due to Pick’n’Mix’s un-opinionated stance on how things should be built, each app had to maintain its build pipelines and menus/games had to orchestrate their own interaction with the GMI, ultimately there was no sharing or composability between apps. On the surface, abstracting native functionality and business logic behind the GMI seemed sensible and good value for money, a single, well-defined API for fetching remote data, right?! Digging into this further though, it was clear that we’d simply offset the cost away from agencies having to build the native functionality (which is good in itself) to agencies having to integrate with an API that was just as complex and potentially more un-intuitive than if we did nothing at all.

This also led to us having significant amounts of duplication across our portfolio of apps. UX patterns implemented time and time again written imperatively with WebGL/Canvas, several integrations and duplicated business logic around how downloads should be handled under certain network conditions, inconsistent bundling tools and inconsistent config approaches across apps.

We used Wardley Mapping to understand where each of the technical components required to ship our apps on Pick’n’Mix sits in terms of the maturity (and thus cost) against the value they deliver to our audience.

From this map, and our experience and knowledge of building hybrid web apps over the years, it was clear the majority of our time and money was being spent building our in-house app wrapping technology, and not on the app experiences themselves.

In 2020, the problem of wrapping HTML5 content for app stores is a well-solved one. Several open-source tools exist that can bundle HTML5 content into a native app, including PhoneGap, Cordova, Capacitor.js, Framework7, Ionic plus others. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and Trusted Web Apps are maturing as standardised ways of building portable, app like web experiences. As well as this, platforms are beginning to support PWAs/HTML5 apps as first-class deployment types, from Android via the Trusted Web Activity through to Amazon Fire TV sticks. Service Workers, Web Workers, and many other mature/newly emerging web standards are coming to fruition that makes building native-like apps on the web a reality.

It is clear that continuing to maintain our hybrid app wrapping framework in 2020 was unsustainable, so we decided to re-orientate ourselves around a series of principles to better inform a more sustainable technical approach to building experiences that can be shipped onto an app store.

Principles

• Embrace the technology — fundamentally our apps are websites, we should embrace that
• A single codebase for app and web — we’d got so caught up in where our code was deployed too, we were not optimising for the right things
• If it exists, we don’t reinvent it — The JavaScript ecosystem is extremely vibrant around the problem area we’re in, we should stand on the shoulders of giants
• It runs anywhere — we want to move away from maintaining proprietary tools and enable web developers to use the tools they are most familiar with
• There is no framework — the most important principle, we want to stand on the shoulders of giants and define a set of opinions that make building our experiences familiar to any developer who has worked on a modern web stack recently

Building a Universal App Platform

Once we set out our principles, we ran some experiments to answer a series of questions. How hard can we push the web today? How close to an app store ready app can we get with little to no native engineering? Could we move all natively built user interface components out to web components? Could we avoid building our own hybrid app framework full stop?

We learnt that as of today, shipping Progressive Web Apps to many platforms is becoming a reality. Whether it is Androids support for PWAs in Google Play via a Trusted Web Activity, or support for modern web standards across a range of smart devices from Smart TVs to Fire TV Sticks — it’s clear this is a rapidly changing and improving field.

Our unique and immersive user interfaces also means that we don’t need to match the native system look and feel. Having our own design system that kids are already familiar with, across all of our experiences, places us in a unique position where a single code implementation makes sense.

Progressive Web Apps are yet to make an appearance across any part of the Apple ecosystem, but we know Safari has been adopting more and more modern web standards which we can use to our advantage as we develop this technical strategy.

We know, however, that there will be gaps in platform support. These gaps require us to have a flexible architecture that puts modern web standards at the heart of our engineering but retains the ability to patch in polyfills/native implementations where required.

From our research and development spikes, we settled on a 3-pronged technical strategy:

1. Modern web standards like Progressive Web Apps now give us the ability to build app quality experiences with just web technology — we should embrace the PWA as our core development environment and optimise for this as a priority
2. Emerging technology and open source tooling give us the capability of shipping compliant Progressive Web Apps to all app stores. We identified Ionic’s Capacitor.js to be the best choice to wrap compliant PWAs for app store distribution
3. A declarative, component-driven architecture will allow us to drive more re-use, increase consistency, and reduce platform-specific implementations across App + Web. We chose React.js to enable us to build up this architecture

PWAs + Capacitor.js + React = Universal App Platform

This is a significant product and technical change for us. We’re shifting our focus away from “we build native apps” to “we build immersive experiences for any platform”. This new way of thinking enables us to build consistency into the platform as a whole whilst also reducing the cost of building our products, reducing cognitive load across all disciplines and making room for us to focus on new product propositions.

Outcomes

• Re-built our entire proprietary app platform in less than a year whilst rebuilding all our menu experiences to have highly reusable, declarative front ends at the same time
• A single codebase composed of multiple apps and a cohesive set of components that can be reused, extended, and delivered across multiple platforms
• A single community of engineers collaborating, improving and developing a shared platform
• Standardised ways of working, linting rules, and testing approaches across multiple teams
• A shift away from imperative WebGL/Canvas programming to a DOM based component model through React.js for our Menu systems
• No further requirement to maintain proprietary development harnesses, testing frameworks, or documentation
• Our ability to power all of our five apps, plus our entire interactive embedding estate of 350+ games from a single codebase and a single set of cohesive components
• The ability to focus on new, product enhancing capabilities across the entire portfolio of Children’s and Education products

Re-mapping where we are today illustrates that through shifting heavily to off the shelf, open source and commodity driven ways of building software, we’ve been able to re-focus our time and money on building immersive experiences for our audiences. We’ve achieved his whilst eliminating significant amounts of duplication as well as having a modern, standardised technical stack and reaping all the benefits that come with this.

The left screenshot below is our existing, bespoke, imperative Canvas/WebGL based Pick’n’Mix wrapped Playtime Island app, on the right is our new skinnable, component driven Progressive Web App wrapped in Capacitor.js producing the Playtime Island app.

Here is just a small flavour of how declarative, composable and intuitive our component driven architecture now is. This component displays an information banner across the app, transitioning onto the screen and animating images that sit either side of the banner text.

What’s coming next?

As the Universal App Platform matures, we will be looking at new opportunities to deliver more compelling, personalised, and rich experiences to our audience, as well as understanding what future opportunities our Universal App Platform can support for products looking to be cross-platform.

In the short term, we will be launching all four CBeebies apps, migrating our game embedding technology and developing rich, personalised experiences to benefit both Web and Apps on the Universal App Platform. Ultimately decommissioning both Pick’n’Mix and our game embedding platform CAGE early 2021.

In the longer term, we’ll be using the opportunities this transformation has provided to develop our product propositions further, looking towards opportunities in personalisation, AR/VR, new platforms and more.

This has been a significant, strategic, technical and product level change for us. A tremendous number of people have been involved in making this change happen. Change at this scale is never easy, but working together is the key to success. Expect to see more details on this blog from teams working on the Universal App Platform over the coming weeks and months.

Here in the UK, BBC Sounds is now one of the most popular audio apps available, and just had its best quarter ever. We’re seeing around 3.5 million people a week listening to the BBC on Sounds across the app, website, connected TVs and voice-activated devices – more than we’ve ever seen before.

There are also millions of people who watch, listen and read BBC content outside the UK – we recently announced the BBC had reached an all-time record global audience of 468 million. Until now, BBC Sounds has only been available for those international listeners through the website, and people who’ve wanted to listen to the BBC through an app have had to use the old international version of the iPlayer Radio app. Now though, the time has come to turn off the old international iPlayer Radio app and transition those users over to BBC Sounds.

From today, the BBC Sounds app will begin to be made available to download on international app stores, available for devices capable of running iOS 11, Android 5 or Amazon OS 5 or above. People who currently use the iPlayer Radio app outside the UK will now begin seeing messages encouraging them to download the BBC Sounds app and switch over. At some point in the near future, the iPlayer Radio app will stop working, and listeners will need to get the BBC Sounds app to continue listening.

This change won’t affect the content international listeners can enjoy. They’ll still be able to listen to all their favourite BBC programmes, the wide range of BBC radio stations will be available to stream live, including the World Service. Popular radio programmes like The Archers, Desert Island Discs, and Radio 5’s Elis James and John Robins show will be available to listen to on-demand, as well as the wide range of hit podcasts from the BBC, including Grounded with Louis Theroux, That Peter Crouch Podcast and George the Poet’s fantastic Have You Heard George’s Podcast?

BBC Sounds will now also offer international listeners a personalised experience they didn’t get with iPlayer Radio, receiving tailored recommendations based on what they’ve been enjoying and the ability to pick up where they left off with their favourite shows. International listeners can also stream BBC Sounds to their Chromecast device, and enjoy the improved experience for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, which offers a larger choice of content from the dashboard than the old iPlayer Radio app did.

These changes won’t impact people within the UK, and we’re excited that international listeners will now be able to get the much-improved experience BBC Sounds offers.

Here in the UK, we’re bringing the BBC Sounds TV app to more devices. Since first launching in March on Virgin Media and YouView, the Sounds TV app has also come to some Sony and Samsung TVs – giving people with those devices another way to listen to their favourite music, radio and podcasts from the BBC. From today, we’ll begin rolling out the TV app on Roku streaming devices, and we’ll be bringing it to more devices in the coming weeks.

We hope you enjoy this update, and that our international listeners enjoy the new Sounds experience. We’ll be bringing more updates in the future to make Sounds even better, and we’ll keep you posted.

Update: Since we last told you about the BBC Sounds on TV app, we’ve made some updates to the app and launched it on several new devices. The Sounds TV app now has search functionality, and viewers can now access their personalised My Sounds section on the TV app experience as well as on the mobile and web versions of Sounds.

We’ve also launched the BBC Sounds TV app on a number of new devices, including Now TV, Roku, Freesat, LG, Freeview Play, and Google TV, and as of today we’re bringing it to all Amazon Fire TV devices too, including sticks and smart TVs. Anyone with those devices will be able to find and add the app, and enjoy all of our best live and on-demand radio, music mixes, and fantastic podcasts like the new series of Grounded with Louis Theroux, Bex Smith’s women’s football podcast The Players and iconic rapper Eve’s new podcast Constantly Evolving.

Update #2:  The BBC Sounds TV app is now also available on Sky Q. You can find the app on the SkyQ screen, or just say “Launch BBC Sounds” into your Sky Q voice remote, and start easily listening to your favourite music, radio and podcasts from the BBC.

Peter Rabbit Running Wild is a follow up to the hugely popular Hop To It game, where kids can choose their favourite from Peter, Lily or Benjamin and explore exciting areas like Mr McGregor’s Garden or Jeremy Fisher’s Lake. Interactive paw prints offer kids lots of things to discover in these places, or they can go and find characters like Jemima Puddle-Duck and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.

Alongside these two new games one of our most popular games, Waffle and Friends, is also getting an update. A brand new fairground level lets two players explore the funfair together and play fun mini games.

CBeebies Playtime Island is an app for families to enjoy together, where kids can learn as they play, and as part of this update we’ve also redesigned it to make it even easier for children to play independently. The Playtime Island app has always put CBeebies favourites like Go Jetters, Mr Tumble and Bing at children’s fingertips, and in this major update we’ve redesigned the island with kids in mind from the very beginning – so they can do this even quicker.

Designed for independent exploration and uninterrupted discovery of a vast catalogue of games, Playtime Island is a safe, delightful and engaging space for children to spend their time. The updated app also includes an enhanced download manager setting, so that parents can control the size of the app, quickly downloading or deleting games as their child’s interests change.

We hope that parents and children enjoy the new games and the new look for the CBeebies Playtime Island app, which is available for free from the Apple, Google Play and Amazon app stores.

Interventions:

When a child is typing a message, the Own It text analysis module will give live feedback on the sentiment of the message and also provides an intervention when the system determines hate, toxicity or a number of safeguarding issues. The intervention can be passive or a full-screen message – providing a nudge or friction to give the user a chance to consider their actions or whether they need help. A new addition to this system is the classification of messages related to coronavirus and isolation. The method looks for the occurrence of words or phrases concerning the issue and then measures if the emotion sentiment is anger, fear or worry. If a user were to type “I’m so lonely with this isolating”, a passive intervention would be presented supporting the child in understanding that it is okay to be worried and they’re not alone –the user is then offered a link to helpful content within the companion app. If the child was to type “I like isolation, I get to read more books”, no intervention would be presented. The nuance of when to intervene is important, it is key part of the user experience that interventions feel helpful and not an annoyance.

Collections:

Within the Own It companion app, there is a For You section that contains content which the system has determined to be important for that user. A new feature added here is Collections. These are swipe-able carousels that contain curated content concentrated on a topic. The first two collections launched with this release are The Lowdown Lockdown and Feeling Anxious or Scared?

The Lockdown Lowdown – entertaining and informative content that inspires children to live their best digital online life while in isolation – with celebrity contributions from pop stars, YouTubers and vloggers.

Feeling Anxious or Scared? – a collection of videos and articles that provide support for children during a time that they are away from their day-to-day support network of friends. Articles cover how to tackle fears and worries, de-stressing and support in understanding that it is normal to have ups and downs.

All of the new features uphold the strict data privacy requirements that have been applied to the Own It app. All of the machine learning and AI is run on the user’s device. No personal data is transferred to the BBC and no messages are logged. All data that is generated within the system is stored and handled locally on the phone. Data privacy is regarded as sacrosanct.

Own It is available on the iOS App Store and Android Play Store. It is designed specifically for smartphones. If you have a child who has recently received their first phone or would benefit from support during these unique times, then encourage them to install Own it and let us know how you get on.

https://www.bbc.com/ownit/take-control/own-it-app

On 5th February 2020, the BBC’s mobile community came together for the first time to discuss the opportunities and challenges they face, share experiences and learn from others working in the mobile space.

Breaking down silos and building a wider mobile community - that was the key message of the introductory address made by Will Wychgram, Senior Architect for Technology Strategy & Architecture (TS&A) who worked tirelessly - alongside TS&A’s Alison Kelly and Diane Richard - to put together the first mobile community conference, with Google’s London Academy as our hosts for the day.

As members of the tech sector - software engineers, developers in test, business analysts, project managers and product owners - we all feel that none of us really have the opportunity to talk to anyone in the other teams with whose products we integrate; or that we can reach out to another team to find out how they might approach a problem that’s causing us some grief. That’s what the inaugural Mobile: Apps & Beyond conference was all about.

The day was full of talks, presentations and opportunities for networking – you can’t beat passing time chatting out in the cold, during a fire drill!

The first of our talks was a fireside chat with Matthew Postgate, BBC Chief Technology & Product Officer - hosted by BBC R&D’s Bill Thompson - who mused that ‘...mobile is still the most tangible expression of the information age…’, aligning with thoughts expressed in a lecture Postgate had heard at the Royal Academy of Engineering regarding information as a utility, in that it would be constantly available and accessible.

Thoughts then turned to 5G and Ambient Computing; Postgate cautioned that whilst 5G will lead to more device connectivity, there’s no telling how users will make use of that bandwidth and that the technology is still quite young. Ambient Computing opens up a number of possibilities and scenarios - it’s something the BBC is exploring with Voice and AI - where we’ll be relying on, perhaps something being said out loud, or triggered by a watch, with the response being displayed; or even an activity started on one device and continued on another.

After being evacuated for a fire drill – surely a coincidence that this followed Matthew’s fireside chat - Victor Riparbelli of Synthesia took to the stage. He has worked with the Blue Room to put together a concept of a personalised weather report utilising a computer generated weather reporter. Riparbelli touched upon other ways Synthesia uses AI to create content, such as generating streets and traffic, and having someone speak a number of languages, as showcased in David Beckham’s Malaria Must Die campaign.

We then had a panel discussion with Neil Hall (Head of Sport Digital), Alex Watson (Head of Product, News), Matt Clark (Head of Architecture, Digital Products), Christine Bellamy (Head of Product, Home) and David Andrade (Head of Software Engineering, iPlayer & Sounds), chaired by Ahmed Razek (Blue Room). Topics of discussion covered:

• The 2020 Vision - The panel turned its thoughts towards ways to generate engagement with BBC content during this year’s Sporting events, and BBC Sounds. By creating a personalised recommended experience for users, with a larger focus on acquiring and retaining under 35s with Project Chrysalis.
• Retaining Under 35s - As this is a large age range to cover, there are different strategies being utilised, such as enhancing children’s experience of iPlayer, encouraging Sign In and celebrating the release of Nightfall; so far, experience shows that teens are harder to engage, but this challenge also presents many opportunities. Across the board though, the panel felt we need to be more granular, to aggregate content and have a better symbiosis and partnership with Editorial, so that we can get relevant content in front of our audiences.
• Staying Competitive - With the launch of Disney Plus and Amazon’s airing of sport, the panel reminded us to have confidence in our position - the BBC has a strong relationship with sports fans and we should be playing to our strengths. However, we shouldn’t rest on our laurels, as it’s good to be worried with the market getting so competitive - it keeps us on our toes and drives us to get more creative. Despite being our competitors, we should still look for opportunities to collaborate with these platforms professionally and create an “Education Space” for us to learn from each other, whilst maintaining our brand identity.
• The Level of Focus on Web vs Mobile - Whilst we get a lot of users interacting with the BBC via mobile, this is not solely through our apps, but also our web presence. We do need to encourage more development in the “App Space” because apps can interact with users in a way that the web doesn’t, such as through push notifications. The panel recognised that there is frustration with the slow pace of change, but assured us this is due to deep structural reasons.

Demos, Networking & Lightning Talks

During lunch, we were given a tour of the BBC Blue Room’s Digital Human demos and BBC R&D helped us discover the potential uses of 5G in content production, consumption and distribution.

After lunch we all participated in a fun networking activity which involved party hats, emoji stickers and some surprising revelations! To round off the day, there were a series of interesting lightning talks - one from Google showcasing some highlights with what to expect from Android Studio 4.0; and the rest from various BBC Mobile teams including News, Sport, iPlayer & Sounds, and Children’s.

Overall the day provided us with a great opportunity to meet, share ideas, collaborate and build new working relationships with other members of the mobile community – it was certainly long overdue and I hope it is just the start of many more such opportunities to come together as one community.

The BBC Accessibility Champion Network is probably one of the oldest in the industry. This year it surpassed 200 champions. There is also an alumnus of 75+ now encouraging inclusive design and accessibility elsewhere in the industry. Here are the top highlights of many accessibility improvements in BBC digital products this year:

UX&D and Internal Tools:

The ‘BBC for Everyone’ video was published by GEL, along with draft technical docs. Neurodiversity won awards. Internal S&SD did screen reader user research for Optimo, a new article editor for News journalists. They also reviewed and improved accessibility of Audiences, the new site for audience research, reports and data.

iPlayer and Sounds:

The web media player introduced subtitle size controls. iPlayer added an ‘Accessibility Help’ link for assistive technology users. iPlayer and Sounds both made efforts to respect an individual’s 'reduce motion’ choice, which can be set in their OS preferences. iPlayer Mobile adopted an ‘accessible first’ mantra to work on a new player interface, available to opt in and try via the app settings. Work has included research with screen reader users and raising issues with OS providers. Behind the scenes work was completed that enabled both iPlayer TV and the new mobile player to add in-player controls for audio description and sign language. iPlayer and Sounds both have active accessibility guilds, and have integrated accessibility into processes, engineering methods, and testing strategies.

Children’s Games & Apps:

Research relationships continued with Seashell Trust and Everyone Can. It enabled and supported user research for CBeebies, CBBC and Bitesize games and interactive content, in turn guiding work on relevant content and the ‘Accessible Games Guidelines’. Bitesize Primary
improved keyboard accessibility across their existing practice games. They also launched 7 new games, with 8 more in development, that deliver on at least one accessibility ‘pillar’.

News:

News index pages became more consistent, easier to navigate, and introduced the BBC Reith font, which is clearer and easier to read on small screens. World Service sites are being re-built with accessibility embedded at every stage. This has extended the champion network outside the UK. Accessibility swarms checked new components built for elections. And Visual Journalism considered accessibility from the start of each project. A scrolling story format that is keyboard accessible and has a toggle for animation is one example of the outcomes from that. The integrated approach shows how Catharine Green becoming Accessibility Lead was a decision that established accessibility as a clear priority for News.

Sport:

Following the example of News, Sophie Beaumont became Accessibility Lead for Sport, and an Accessibility Guild was set up. They embedded accessibility considerations into all team processes and built up a prioritised backlog of improvements. The teams have since created new pages and features that are some of the most accessible Sport experiences yet.

Weather:

A redesign of tide table pages for Coast and Sea section means they are now responsive, more legible and ‘glanceable’, and adapted for touch devices. The improved navigation for future dates also links to an accessible table version of the information with live updates provided to assistive technology. And animated indicators update in real time while adhering to an individual’s ‘reduce motion’ preferences.

Web Core:

This year a big change of direction toward a centralised approach took shape. The goal is a shared, non-versioned kit of parts, from which to create digital products and services. The team are building brand new components following the GEL technical docs. The docs provide pragmatic advice for actual implementation with accessibility built in. This approach should also mean that future accessibility improvements roll out fast.

Voice & AI:

New tech on the block means a lot of user research. This has ensured the BBC’s collective Alexa skill is intuitive to navigate while reducing distraction and cognitive load. And it’s informing work begun on ‘Beeb’, a voice assistant from the BBC. Accessibility is a key requirement of both the user interface and brand development.

BBC Studios:

The commercial arm of the BBC may need a slightly different approach, but accessibility is still a key requirement. A redesign of Top Gear has provided the perfect opportunity to educate the team and make accessibility part of the end-to-end process of delivery.

Elsewhere:

Small changes, like improving link text in the cookie banner or checking the accessibility of a new local search feature before implementation, can ensure a better experience for many people. Though our champions don’t keep to small. Many blogged and presented this year, including Peter Gould and Nicola Quinn. They presented “How to Bake Muffins” at a #BuildTheBBC event open to the public. A heart-warming tale about why accessibility should be considered from the start of a project. Peter also built taba11y in his spare time, a useful Chrome plugin already being used in-house.

Coming Up

Most BBC teams now ‘bake in’ accessibility. Look out for improved universal sign-in and children’s sign-in from BBC Account team. And also improved audience participation experiences. Research is being conducted to support insights into how children with varied and complex impairment use technology. Other research is looking at how to make interactive content more accessible for neurodiverse users. And the new accessibility guilds and groups in Bitesize, iPlayer& Sounds, and Voice & AI should make an impact throughout 2020. 

Conversations have definitely moved on from explaining ‘why’ accessibility is important. We now talk collectively about ‘how’ we deliver accessibility. A champion network that keeps accessibility part of the daily conversations is pivotal to that shift. The BBC sets an accessibility benchmark that many organisations strive to emulate. No easy feat in the constantly changing and evolving digital space. An active network of Accessibility advocates, our Champions, Leads, Groups and Guilds, is what makes that possible.

Own It consists of a custom keyboard and companion application. The keyboard features technology and machine learning that can assess, intervene and provide help for areas including bullying, hate, toxicity, data privacy and emotions. Once installed, the Own It keyboard becomes the default for all text input fields, covering apps and web applications. This allows the system to provide in-the-moment support, in many cases, before a message is sent – encouraging children to stop and think before they share.

The Own It companion app allows the user to see how they are using their device alongside being able to keep a diary of their feelings. Content is presented that aids children in understanding the available insights and guides them to develop resilient behaviours.

The Own It app was a complex product to develop with many technical challenges to overcome. What follows is a whistle-stop tour through six of the key ones:

1: Providing live feedback within a keyboard

A major feature of Own It is that the keyboard can provide the right support at the right time. To enable this we needed the text to be analysed as it is being typed. A text analysis module, powered by machine learning models, assesses the text for hate, toxicity, emotions, privacy data and a series of safeguarding issues. The system will instantly respond with an intervention where necessary and will also keep the user informed on the emotion sentiment of the message.

When children are in human social situations, they may step over an adult imposed red-line or social norm – but they will, usually, quickly realise that there is a problem because they can see reactions on the faces of the adults or their peers. Once the issue is identified, the child can adjust their behaviour to quickly fit into the norm for the situation. When engaging in online activities, there is little in the way of visual cues, red lines can be crossed in terms of behaviour and the user may not realise until much later. The Own It keyboard is seeking to fix this via the means of a feedback mechanism. By putting a face on the keyboard, the user can see how the message may be received. The face will display how the recipient may interpret the message – this nudges the sender to think about the tone of the message and consider adjusting it to something more palatable.

The face takes a feed from an emotion sentiment classifier that has been developed for this task. The classifications have been derived from the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, a measurement method that has underpinned much of the project design.

When issues with hate or toxicity, privacy or safeguarding are determined, the keyboard will present a related intervention. This is displayed in one of two forms.

A passive intervention will give the child information but without interrupting the flow of input – for example, “Are you sure you should be sharing your phone number?” – We don’t know who the recipient of the message is going to be, so raising the question to the child, allows them to think and judge if it is the right course of action.

A full intervention covers the keyboard entirely. The user is forced to acknowledge the issue by either dismissing the intervention or finding out further information. Own It will never stop a message from being sent, it just seeks to ensure the child is supported as fully as possible.

2: On-device encapsulation

During the discovery phase of the project, we built a proof-of-concept text analyser. This allowed us to begin to experience, measure and comprehend how real-time analysis could work. For the first prototype, a cloud-based solution was implemented - 3.5 GB of machine learning models and word-embeddings hosted on a server. For both data security and speed of response reasons, we wanted to move all text analysis to function entirely on the users’ device.

It seemed like a stretch, but it was essential to explore whether we could achieve the objective of miniaturising the model ensemble to the extent required. An iteration of our proof of concept applied FastText compression to the text classification, producing a first on-device build that totalled less than 40mb, only 1% of the original size. Some accuracy was lost with the models, but we had proved that a serviceable model ensemble could be placed onto a smartphone to achieve the product aspirations.

When moving to production, different compression methods were applied to the models that allowed the size to be reduced to less than 20mb. Further work on the datasets and model design meant that the final f1, recall and precision scores were better than the results from our original 3.5 GB model set.

A key element that enabled the process was to establish a workflow that enabled the model ensemble to be constructed and then ported to both Android and iOS. On-device machine learning is still in its infancy, certainly in terms of natural language processing – however, a route was found using a Keras CNN base model. The Keras model can be transformed to function with CoreML on iOS and with Tensorflow Lite on Android. Developing and testing on the single Keras model reduced the amount of resource required to ensure the efficacy of the system, as well as providing parity between the platform experiences.

3: Ensuring the quality of feedback

The data sets used to train the machine learning models - for hate, toxicity and emotion sentiment - consisted of full sentences. The sort a person would send in a message or put into a note. However, when a user is on a device, inputting text, the sentences don't just appear whole - they are typed in sequentially. This is problematic for a system that is making a prediction on an input, when that input is incrementally changing.

The initial builds and prototypes of Own It provided an experience that showed a confused emotion sentiment feedback mechanism, certainly when the early part of a sentence was being typed. We needed a method to neutralise those first few entered words of a sentence while they were being entered, only engaging the text analysis when there was enough context to make a reasonable prediction on the emotion sentiment. Word or character count was a far too simplistic method, giving poor results. Analysis of the grammatical construct of sentences was a step too far - certainly for a project that already had many complex moving parts.

The implemented solution to this problem was surprisingly simple but provided a significant improvement to the user perception of the issue. 1/2 million messages, mostly from young people were analysed and a collection was made of the most common 'sentence starts'. That is, words that are present in a sentence before the object, subject or other context is imparted. For example:

• What was the...
• Can I have a…
• Thank you for your…

The list was filtered down to contain only the most common ‘starts’, eventually totalling less than 2000. When a user types a message that matches or partially matches anything in the list, the text isn't analysed and therefore the visual feedback is neutral. Because the list only contains partial sentences, the text analysis and related responses kick in as soon as the emerging sentence begins to have meaning. This function reduced the occurrence of early and uninformed analysis by an amount that has all but taken the problem off the table. While restricting variances in sentiment response early in most sentences, the system still allows short or uncommon sentences to be analysed and responded to. The user experience is much more consistent, allowing trust to grow in the asserted feedback on display.

4: Restricting the occurrence of bias within results

All data contains bias – much of the training data for Own It came from human sources, so the biases are innate. The challenge for Own It was to counter the bias, both in the training sets and by using pre-processing methods, so that the outcomes are as unaffected as possible.

One area of potential bias came up with the emotion sentiment classification, where the displayed representation is a facial reaction to the emotion of the message. There was a worry that protected characteristics, such as race, gender and religion could have a possibility of affecting the results and provide responses that could cause offence (a misplaced angry or frightened face). As the key function of the emotion sentiment classifier is to determine only the emotion of a given sentence, the presence of any protected characteristic should not affect that response. With this taken as a rule, we needed to remove the protected words before analysis – without affecting the construct of the sentence. A ‘Bias Neutraliser’ list was drawn up containing the characteristics and grammatical variations.

This Bias Neutraliser list is parsed when the message is being pre-processed ahead of submission to the text analysis models. If a word or phrase matches the list, then it is neutralised within the sentence. To retain the sentence structure, the matched word is replaced with a neutral word – in the implementation, literally the word “neutral”. So, “the Christian walked down the stairs” is passed through the analysis as “the neutral walked down the stairs”. In this case, the word ‘Christian’ is given no opportunity to influence the emotion sentiment results.

The implemented Bias Neutraliser pre-processing affects only the system responses and provides a layer of support for the emotion sentiment analysis, allowing it to focus on its core purpose.

5: Developing Children's focussed keyboard

When trying to make a keyboard that is to be used by children – it isn’t just all of the basic elements that need to be in place, they each need to be developed with a young audience in mind. Autocorrect, autocomplete and next-word prediction must perform to a high standard AND be relevant for the users.

To support these core keyboard functions, we developed a children’s dictionary. An analysis of messages written by young people produced a word density map of the most used words and their frequency of use. The result was compared to a standard adult-focussed list and merged to create a core system dictionary that ensured the broadest range of users could benefit.

With improvements driven by words commonly used by young people, there was still an omission related to the uptake of new online language by young audiences who engage with the plethora of available platforms. New words and phrases emerge and are used within messaging on specific platforms, a growing expansion of the lexicon driven by new technology and its users. Whether it is yeet, thicc, poggers or oomfs (look them up - the etymology of the chat speak area is a fascinating story, one not for this blog, however.). The Own It keyboard is designed to work on all media platforms seeking to make the experiences as friction-free as possible. For this to work well, the functions need to be cognizant of these new words. A review of this ‘chat-speak’ allowed us to create a glossary that informed an expansion of the dictionary, giving it a wide enough set if terms for now, but this will be an ongoing journey.

6: Ensuring data privacy

Data privacy within the Own It experience has been a primary objective. It is the reason we have encapsulated the machine learning models onto the device and is also the reason we don't key log any of the data. When a message is typed, it is passed for analysis. Once a user sends or deletes their message - no record of it is stored. A data point is generated for each message sent. This contains just the sentiment of the message and a flag for any interventions types that may have occurred. This data point is placed in a secure data store on the device and can only be accessed by the companion app - the system will analyse these data points, looking for insights which can be presented to the user via support content.

The setup of the Own It system gives the machine learning a closed loop. A user can report false positives. If they receive an intervention, they can report that it was incorrect - by investigating the patterns of these false positives, we can work out where some of the classifiers aren't working as well as expected and put effort into finding and shaping further datasets that can help to improve the accuracy of these models.

Outside of this user feedback loop, the Own It team will be looking to improve the datasets and implement new techniques to increase the accuracy and performance of the full machine learning ensemble.

The advancement and proliferation of AI has created a window of problem-solving capabilities. With these new capabilities, comes a need to act both ethically and with responsibility. Within the Own It product, we have endeavoured to employ machine learning for good and treat personal data as sacrosanct. It is crucial for users to have confidence that the system is there to support them and is worthy of trust. Within the companion app, we have content that describes how Own It works. Written in an easily digestible form, it seeks to add a layer of transparency that will grow trust in Own It and that it is there to provide dedicated help to the individual.

 

To develop and build the Own It product machine learning and analysis elements, the BBC worked in partnership with Switzerland-based Privately. Some of Privately's previously developed models were enhanced and encapsulated onto devices, while new models and related technologies were co-developed and implemented. The audience facing elements of Own It were developed and built in partnership with Glasgow’s Chunk Digital.

Own It is now available on the iOS App Store and Android Play Store. It is designed specifically for smartphones. If you have a child who is about to receive their first phone or has recently done so, then get them to install Own It and let us know how you get on.

We’re also introducing support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, enabling drivers to safely enjoy BBC Sounds whilst behind the wheel. This support was available for iPlayer Radio, but for Sounds we’ve built and improved upon the experience, offering drivers a larger choice of content from the dashboard.

Listeners will have four main sections to explore: My Sounds, which brings your Bookmarks, Subscriptions and your Latest list into one handy place, just as it does on the app; Browse, which provides a route to explore music mixes and recommendations; Stations which lets you listen to our live radio stations; and Downloads, where, as you’d expect, you’ll find everything you’ve downloaded on the app.

To use the new in-car experience, Android owners can either connect to a compatible car display or download and run the Android Auto app on any Android phone running Android 5.0 or above, while iPhone owners will need an Apple CarPlay-equipped vehicle.

These updates are the latest in a number of changes we’ve made to the app since it first launched. We recently introduced live rewind and live restart on the BBC Sounds app, which means listeners can now restart any live programme and listen to it from the beginning, or rewind to any point in the live programme and pick it up from there. They can also pause a live stream and later resume from where they left off or jump back to live. It’s been a really popular feature on the web, but is a new feature for the BBC Sounds app, one that wasn’t available on the BBC iPlayer Radio app.

We’ve also added the popular sleep timer feature from iPlayer Radio, so that people can make sure the programme or station they’re playing stops after their chosen amount of time. We’ve added a share button, so that people can easily share their favourite programmes on their social media.

Other updates we’ve made include autoplay, which automatically cues up other episodes in a series or a recommendation after the thing you’re listening to has finished, we’ve started displaying the shows you’ve been listening to and how far through you are on the home screen, and Siri Shortcuts, which lets you set and use a personal phrase to launch BBC Sounds and quickly play your favourite BBC stations.

And we’re not done yet. There’s lots more functionality coming very soon to the BBC Sounds app, including Chromecast support, which we know some of our listeners are really keen on, showing more programme information for live and future programmes and a major revamp of categories, which will introduce sub-categories (e.g. crime drama), a new podcast category and different sort options. We’ll also soon be enabling listeners to open tracks they discover in our music mixes and on-demand programmes in Spotify or Apple Music.

As mentioned at the top of this post, feedback’s been an important part of making the BBC Sounds app what it is today, and it’ll continue to be vital in how we develop the app going forward. Please keep it coming, it’s invaluable.

Open just about any mobile app and your experience is no doubt being tailored for you in some way by algorithms, personalisation, AI, Big Data, machine learning... any more buzzwords you can think of?

This can be great for us as users... we get a better feed, faster.

With the refreshed BBC+ app, we will be making recommendations using data to take steps towards re-inventing the BBC for a new generation.

It also brings a great opportunity to be more experimental in our approach. We will be testing ideas quickly to realise the possibilities of a data driven world both in the way we work and the way we make our products. We have some of the most popular apps in the UK, and know we could do a lot more to improve and make them more welcoming, relevant and personal. We also need to understand how, as a public service organisation, we maintain our values in a data driven world.

One of the biggest challenges with making our data more connected is that the information we have on our content is based on our organisational structure.This means you can indicate a topic that is relevant to you in the BBC News app (such as health) but that preference is not reflected in iPlayer and so we currently don’t recommend all the great health shows you might like. This can be frustrating as you have to set up and manage each product separately.

To change this we are aiming for a more consistent and personalised experience. What if we could easily bring the best content we make, to you, from anywhere in the BBC? Would people discover and enjoy the BBC more? We need to take some risks, try some new and challenging ideas, and ask some tough questions as we work towards a more relevant and personal BBC for everyone.

With this in mind, we are today making an experimental update to our BBC+ app.

Why change BBC+?

BBC+ was set up as a personal BBC app with similar goal, however without the support of the data capabilities we are trying now. It didn't take off as we'd hoped. Much of what it currently offered is provided by BBC News and replicates the BBC Homepage.

In order to move forward we have decided to start again, while beginning to use machine learning and data. Our plan is to keep it small, to try new ideas as quickly as possible, learn as we go and improve based on regular feedback.

The new BBC+ app is a combined effort from the Datalab and BBC+ app development teams. We have also been working collaboratively with colleagues from across the BBC to understand the challenges we collectively face. My colleague Svetlana Videnova describes some of the technical approach in her blog and the Datalab team have released a free online course to help people understand machine learning, data science and how we work.

For now the new BBC+ app contains short videos, however there is far more breadth and depth to explore than the old app. Our overall mission is to help you discover the gems that you didn’t even know you were missing, at a time that suits you.

This is clearly an early starting point and as we learn more we expect to make changes often

Why now?

We are releasing this update at an early experimental phase as we believe using data and machine learning in the BBC is a shared challenge and needs to be done in a transparent way.

Working in a closed group limits how much we can learn about machine learning and so we want to invite your feedback and discussion throughout the process. We know there are improvements we need to make and we want people to be directly involved in shaping the next stage. Our team are keen to gather thoughts and ideas on improvements, and so please use the feedback buttons in the app to send in your thoughts and comments. The team will be reporting back regularly on progress!

BBC+ is available on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.bbc.bbc_plus

and iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/bbc-the-bbc-just-for-you/id1110317391?mt=8

 

One of the key objectives for the BBC for the coming years is to focus on younger audiences. Machine Learning recommendation capabilities can help us achieve that.

In a recent speech to BBC staff Tony Hall described our shared ambition “to grow our weekly online reach with younger audiences from 55% to 90% within four years”. We expect that proving personalised content via the Datalab platform to the new BBC+ app, including the learning throughout the experiment, will begin to contribute to this growth.  Product Manager James Metcalfe describes the approach and objectives of BBC+ in his blog post.

The aim of Datalab, part of BBC Design + Engineering, is to help achieve this vision and reach younger audiences, via a new way of working and by experimenting with new technologies.

Datalab is the first BBC platform working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in production. Being the pioneer of this integration is meant to refine our approach to information security and the data privacy approval process, as well as establishing a new infrastructure.

As if this wasn’t challenging enough, we brought more excitement to our engineering team by including gRPC integration, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes and Spinnaker for container-based deployments and Drone as part of our stack. As a team the decision was made to implement these technologies, regardless of the fact that not everyone was experienced with them. As a result, we have adopted some more than others, but again, one of the key points is that we learn along the way, and gain skills that will be valuable later in the programme.

As a platform, we had to connect to the existing BBC data stores, including our User Activity Store (UAS) database, as well as serving the media content from a different AWS database.

This infrastructure allowed us to provide the groundwork for data scientists to start to explore various methods to satisfy the needs of BBC products and master the personalised experience for BBC users, starting with BBC+ app.

For example, new users, who have no previous history with the BBC, are given a cold start recommendation, so that they can begin their BBC+ journey. The first focus for the Datalab team was to create these recommendations to serve relevant content. It progressively incorporates a user’s history, refines their content and helps them discover interesting BBC suggestions.

Finding out what data we had to work with was crucial. We quickly discovered that the metadata for some BBC content is inconsistent. This lead us to conversations with our editorial colleagues on ways of tagging and creating content metadatain a more uniform manner, so that we can surface their output to the audience in a more personalised way.

The first content type to be ingested is video clips. In the future the aim is to include audio and articles. Currently in our Elasticsearch DB we have 1,137,598 clips. A set of filters was applied to provide only relevant clips, with complete metadata and editorial risks mitigated:

• Unique clips
• Only English content (for now)
• Filter out audio and weather (for now)
• Filter out clips older than 2013 (for now)
• Editorial risk filtering
• 128 BBC brands are not surfaced in the BBC+ app
• 8 master brand were filtered out (mainly to help serve only English content for now)

That leaves us to 131,626 clips available for BBC+ users.

The following techniques are being used by our data science team, to experiment, score and create “better” recommendations:

• Model-based collaborative filtering: we’re using embeddings for our content using word2vecmodels, making the content -“words” and our playlists -“sentences”
• Offline scoring: to measure how a particular recommender system is performing, we’re using different metrics, like recency, popularity, Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) and hit-rate. This helps us to select which versions of our models should go for online scoring
• Online scoring: we have a system in place to score the recommenders with the live user data, using A/Bor hit-ratetesting, whenever necessary
• Combining ML with editorial guidelines: we can prioritise one genre or brand against the others, to fit the editorial needs and better match our audience expectation
• To help share what we know we created a course, to establish a good understanding of what we are building

We came out of this iterative process full of valuable insights, and building a new ML platform was just one of the things we discovered. Datalab established a positive team culture, with a great deal of multi-disciplinary learning. Despite the bumpy road, we now have a clear vision of our engineering and data science responsibilities, including A/B testing our process, trying various agile methodologies, and bringing teams in Salford and London together for closer collaboration.

We are excited about the next steps, and there is a lot to do on all aspects of our platform: infrastructure, engineering, devops, data science and ML. We will be inviting a new BBC team into the Datalab world: beginning with an exploratory session with the Voice Team over Christmas. We will also be proposing collaborations with other product groups, including R&D and News, early in 2019 to continue to experiment, push the boundaries of our exploration further and innovate ML in the BBC.

If you would like to know more about Datalab, our journey, or you would like to share your own experience, feel free to contact us at datalab@bbc.co.uk.

And in other important news: we are still recruiting! https://findouthow.datalab.rocks/

BBC+ is available on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.bbc.bbc_plus

and iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/bbc-the-bbc-just-for-you/id1110317391?mt=8

 

One Star!

“Catastrophic”. “Disappointing”. “Pointless”. “Awful”. “Baffling and lacking”. “Useless compared to iPlayer Radio”.

Those are just some of the things users have been saying in reviews of the new BBC Sounds mobile app.

Reading one star reviews about something you work on requires an ability to avoid taking things personally — even when they can become seemingly quite personal.

I’m the Software Engineering Team Lead on the BBC Sounds App team. It might sound strange, but I have a personal favourite one-star review. The wording is always different but the message is the same. It’s the review which says “this app was released too soon — it’s not ready yet”.

Why is this my favourite? Because it manages to be entirely right while also being entirely wrong, and succinctly describes exactly what we’re trying to do.

Release Early, Release Often

An app is a culmination of thousands of decisions, big and small. Our first major decision was to make a new app for BBC Sounds instead of converting iPlayer Radio, which this team also built and is responsible for maintaining. We’d been tasked with making a new product to combine the best of the BBC Music and iPlayer Radio apps. Converting would have meant reworking nearly every part of iPlayer Radio’s codebase, fitting a round peg into a square hole. On top of that, when we released Sounds, iPlayer Radio users would have had to move immediately instead of having a transition period.

Another early decision was to get all the data the app needed from a single source — the new ‘Experience API’ built by the Radio & Music Services (RMS) team, which Patrick recently wrote about — instead of the variety of different back-end services iPlayer Radio fetched information from.

Decisions like these freed us from assumptions made long in the past, as well as reducing the size of the problems we would need to solve and allowing us to focus on exactly what a mobile team should be focusing on: building the best, most reliable, most usable and most beautiful app we could build.

For our fresh start, we began with one simple aim: connect to a server and show either a green or a red box, depending on what response we got. It’s a simple concept, but immediately we had even more decisions to make.

We decided to write our new app entirely in Swift on iOS and in Kotlin on Android . These are modern programming languages which had only recently taken over from Objective-C and Java (as used in iPlayer Radio) as the standards for mobile development. We decided on an N-tier architecture for the app and MVVM(ish) for the UI layer. We made decisions about what frameworks we should use for making network requests, dependency injection techniques, a ‘bootstrapping’ system for the app so we could manage app startup logic in a single place. We created Services and Coordinators and Factories and Repositories and View Models.

Crucially, we made these early decisions together as a team, because we decided to ‘Mob Program’ through the initial stages of development. This meant all the engineers, Android and iOS, gathered around a single screen and worked together across both platforms for the first few weeks. We all learned together how our new app would work, we all agreed on how we should be writing code, and we could all help each other when problems arose. Even now, though mob programming across platforms is not as common, we are still able to collaborate as a whole team and help each other solve problems.

When we’d finished with our red and green boxes, we decided to make a release. We acted as if this would be the version that was going out to the public and we tested it thoroughly. That was Version 0.1. Version 0.2 brought the ability to sign in to a BBC account before you saw the green box. Version 0.3 added the first version of the Listen page, and in Version 0.4 we added the audio player. In a handful of weeks we’d gone from green and red boxes to a workable audio app. From there we just kept on iterating.

An app is never late. Nor is it early. It arrives precisely when it means to.

In June 2018, we released an app which did the most important things — allowing you to discover, bookmark and listen to all sorts of BBC content — but with some glaring and important omissions. Releasing to the public is a huge moment for an app, but thanks to the months we’d spent practicing making releases it didn’t feel like such a big deal. Rather than having to switch gear from ‘pre-release’ to ‘live maintenance’, we were ready to iterate again and release again.

In the four months since our initial version came out, we’ve released 10 new updates to the BBC Sounds app on each platform, an average of one update every two weeks. These were not small releases, either — we’ve added big important features like downloads, station schedules and episode track listings, as well as fixing major issues such as remembering and displaying your progress through an episode throughout the entire app, not just in the Continue Listening section.

It’s not something everyone wants to admit, but some of the decisions we make turn out to be mistakes. Some of these mistakes are obvious from the moment we try prototyping them, some come out when we do usability testing, some take a while to shake out and mean revisiting things we thought were done. There’s mistakes in our codebase, mistakes in our UI, mistakes in our decisions about which features are most important. We can never really be sure until we hear from real users in the real world.

We’ve had lots of feedback from users about Sounds, some from users who really love the app, some from those that don’t. We use that feedback, especially the critical comments, to help prioritise and decide on what we should do next. It’s a balancing act, where we want to make sure the app works well for users moving over from iPlayer Radio, but works just as well for users who are new to radio entirely, and for younger audiences who we know were under-served by iPlayer Radio.

What we’ve done so far is just the beginning. We’re a team of radio, podcast and music enthusiasts who want to build the best audio app in the world. To do that, the important thing is not avoiding mistakes; it’s continually finding them, fixing them and learning from them.

So if we hadn’t released this app ‘too soon’, how would we know what to do next?

Five Star

Just to finish off, indulge me the opportunity to say a big thank you to the small team of hugely talented engineers, designers, testers and all the others involved in building this app. Everyone works exceptionally hard and deserves to feel incredibly proud of what we’ve built — and what we’re going to build in the next update, and the next one, and the one after that. It’s a privilege to work with such a talented group of folks.

“Brilliant”. “Incredible”. “Cleverly designed and intuitive”. “More modern and usable than the app it’s replacing”. “Everything is so accessible”. “Sleek and simple”. “Top work from the BBC”.

Those are just some of the things users have been saying in reviews of the new BBC Sounds mobile app.

This week CBeebies has launched Get Creative; a brand new app aiming to inspire creativity in our youngest audience. Through a range of unique experiences and featuring our biggest brands, children can build their creative confidence in an exploratory, open-ended world with no limits.

This is the latest innovation to be delivered as part of the Kids 2020 strategy, which is the biggest investment in digital content and experiences for children in a generation. Get Creative offers a compelling range of creative experiences built around CBeebies brands that our users love. The app will sit alongside our established CBeebies apps, Playtime Island and Storytime, and offer both a safe space for kids and an app that parents can trust.

At CBeebies, we know how vital creativity is in children’s social and emotional development. The Get Creative product has been developed to primarily to serve our 3-5 year old audience, fulfilling their key needs of self-expression and independence. Still, the product design process has worked carefully to make all experiences appealing for a broader age range of children and, importantly, for all abilities. Younger children are easily able to get creative in the simplest form and the open-ended design of experiences allows older children to build their creative skills in more involved play.

Get Creative is set in a crazy, messy and magical 3D factory, which instantly sparks imagination and encourages children to explore. The app has been designed around a simple brand led navigation, to allow quick and easy access to creative play with their favourite brand characters including Hey Duggee, Go Jetters and Bitz and Bob.

The Get Creative team have developed the app with children at the heart of the process, from co-creating initial concept ideas to shaping the finer details of the interface to make it as easy to use as possible.

The app launches with four unique creativity experiences covering magic painting, toy making, sound drawing and storytelling. This unique set of tools offers children the opportunity to make what they can’t elsewhere. The experiences have been specifically designed as intuitive, unrestrained, re-playable and have the ability to be used independently without an adult’s help.

• Magic Paint – A delightful drawing tool where kids can use different paint, tapes, stickers and stencils and watch their creations come to life!
• Terrific Toys – Children can create their own mix and match toys and play with them in a dedicated playground area.
• Sound Doodles – An innovative experience offering kids the opportunity to make music from their doodles.
• Play Puppets – Children can direct their very own episodes of their favourite CBeebies shows by animating puppets, props and watching their performances.

Get Creative features a gallery underneath the factory floor, which showcases all creations in one place, allowing children to continue play at a touch of a button. Along with a simple, app wide reward system, these product features allow children to celebrate their success and feel a real sense of achievement.

Regular creative challenges will be featured in the app, offering more inspiration and ways for children to Get Creative. These will also be promoted across our TV and web platforms to encourage their participation.

The launch version of Get Creative is just the start, and we have a packed product roadmap with regular additions coming in following months. With Christmas creative challenges, additional creative experiences and scaling of the number of our most well loved CBeebies characters, there will be many reasons for children to want to return regularly to the app to Get Creative!

The World Cup is up and running and our online teams are in tournament mode as England enter the fray this evening with their opener against Tunisia live and exclusive across the BBC.

Major events like this on BBC Sport are always hugely popular with our audiences, and this year we’re offering more ways to follow the action than ever before.

We want to give people the best-possible World Cup experience and our online efforts focus on two main areas – enhancing our own BBC Sport digital service, including the website and apps, and engaging audiences via social media to raise awareness of our coverage and drive them to our digital and broadcast platforms.

We have some brilliant new features on our own service (alongside all the fan favourites we know people love) and some exciting tie-ins with social platforms, so I wanted to give an overview of all the key things here.

On the BBC

Our live HD coverage is the main event and all 33 matches live on BBC TV are available to watch online through BBC Sport and BBC iPlayer, while people can also listen to Five Live Radio commentary from all games. We recently announced two exciting trials, giving people the chance to watch in Ultra HD and High Dynamic Range and even from the stands in Russia, through our new VR app, live for the first time.

Regular users will know that on match days our live pages kick in, featuring all the build-up, breaking news, live-text commentary and the best comments from fans across social media. These pages are at the centre of our coverage again, especially on mobile devices. We have made some big changes under-the-hood, including getting in-game goal clips published more quickly and rebuilding the live text stream to enhance its performance through better speed and reliability.

We have also refreshed our connected TV app to give greater prominence to live content, this makes it easy for viewers to watch the games live with alternative match commentary from Radio 5 Live and access alternative camera angles of the action, like the tactical camera view.

We have broadened the range of live video we can offer through a trial that makes it possible for our correspondents like Phil McNulty and David Ornstein to stream live directly from Russia into these live pages from their mobile phones for the first time. We hope it’ll help bring fans closer to the action on-the-ground, which is exactly what our live pages are designed to do.

And of course, we’ve got those who can’t watch live covered too. We have video highlights for every game and goal scored at the World Cup available at the final whistle through our BBC Sport products, with a daily catch-up offering also available across BBC iPlayer.

Personalisation has been a big focus for us over the last few years and, through the BBC Sport mobile app, people can set a wide range of alerts (including line-ups, kick-off, goals, half-time and full-time scores) for their favourite team… or for all 32 teams if they really want to. We also have image and video alerts for those not watching live, so they can see the key moments as soon as they happen right on their lock screen. And our focus on performance across mobile devices has seen us upgrade the ‘My Sport’ area of the app to make it load much faster.

We have three interactive features that have proven to be really popular, especially with younger audiences. The Team Selector lets people take control of the hot seat and show the likes of Southgate and Deschamps how it should be done. And our new Player Rater lets fans become pundits as they give their own ratings of player performance. The scale of the audience participating with these features is large enough that we can represent the nation’s view on the selections and ratings, providing great content and talking points across our online and broadcast services. While audiences can also take part in quizzes against the clock thanks to ‘Quizimodo’, our new in-house quiz engine.

We’ll also have exclusive audio content available through smart speakers for the first time too provided by Radio 5 Live, so listen out for this if you are chatting to Alexa or using your Apple HomePod device - just ask your speaker to ‘Take me to the World Cup’, or ask for the “Take me to the World Cup BBC podcast”.

Not only are these innovations going to be in action over the next month or so, but they enhance our day-to-day offer as we work to build on our position as the UK’s leading digital sport service and strengthen our engagement with younger audiences beyond the tournament.

Across social media

BBC Sport’s social accounts provide a wide range of content for the World Cup, bringing the audience closer to the action, the personalities and the pundits. We also work with all the major platforms to make the most of their unique features, giving their users some exclusive content while helping drive people back to the BBC’s live matches and comprehensive online coverage.

Twitter will be where our in-match updates and breaking news are posted throughout the tournament, with the best video moments also available to watch on our accounts. And we will deliver broadcast clips into approximately 15-20 editions of Snapchat’s daily World Cup Stories to reach out to the younger teenagers who use that service.

On Facebook we’ll continue to deliver a mix of news stories, images and video to our followers, including a World Cup catch-up video at the end of each day. And our rapidly growing Match of the Day Instagram account (@bbcmotd) will feature World Cup archive and 2018 action direct to our followers. We’ll also produce daily Instagram Stories featuring BBC pundits and presenters, including former England Women’s star, Alex Scott, alongside the best highlights from the day. And finally, our YouTube channel will show video highlights – putting our coverage to the front of Google for those users searching for the latest action.

Needless to say, we’re all really excited by England’s game tonight and are looking forward to delivering world-class coverage online as the tournament builds over the coming weeks. We hope audiences love it, and that even more people are encouraged to enjoy it across our digital and broadcast services because of our social media content.

Three years ago, we launched a new BBC News app in the UK and internationally which gives you a more personalised news experience on mobiles and tablets.

Behind the scenes, the new app was one element of a technical project to move BBC News services onto a cloud infrastructure, as part of our effort to deliver the best value for money.

We have been running the old app for Kindle Fire devices in parallel in the Amazon Kindle Store, but now, because the technology on which that old app is based is part of a legacy system, we are no longer able to support it.

The BBC is retiring this technology, which means the old app will no longer be supported, from the 25th of May you will no longer be able to download the BBC News app from the Amazon Kindle Store.

We are also ending support for the older version of the app across iOS and Android. In the following weeks any existing installations on these devices will stop updating with new content.

For those of you that haven’t downloaded the latest app, it’s available for Apple devices running iOS 9.0 and above and Android devices running 4.1 and above. In the UK, it can be downloaded from the App Store and Play Store respectively.

Since we launched the new app in 2015, we have continued to develop it - introducing notification features, building experiences for vertical video - optimised for watching on your mobile - and providing quicker access to interactive content and long-read articles.

The app also provides better access to a broader range of content than the previous version, including local news. It has lists of most read and most viewed content across BBC News and improved photo galleries and video playback – letting us surface much more of BBC News’ video content. For the first time, the app can also be personalised – with a ‘My News’ section, highlighting news topics and stories you want to follow.

If your device is not supported and you can’t download the app, please go to our responsive site.

Outside the UK, you can download the new app from the Play Store and App Store , or go to our responsive site.

If you’re living in the UK - and for many of you around the world - you’ll probably recognise the staccato chime and burst of drums from your mobile, telling you that something important has happened in the world. Natural disasters, election results, the death of infamous celebrities, and royal nuptials; all these gifts of knowledge are delivered to you by the BBC News mobile app.

And, you won’t be alone. The News app has over 9 million users each week; that’s roughly equal to the population of London. The Android app, which we’ll put in the spotlight in this article, is available in a number of flavours, all built from a single codebase. Outside of the UK we offer an ad-supported version for global English-speaking audiences, as well as five other language variants: Arabic, Hindi, Mundo (for Spanish speakers in South America), Russian, and Welsh. Our users are loyal, too, with a third of visitors using the app daily.

We’re responsible for keeping people informed about what’s going on in the world around them, so our app has to be stable and reliable. It needs to be simple to use and accessible to all. But we also try to present our content in creative and engaging ways, which means taking advantage of new libraries and APIs as they become available.

Keeping things fresh

We release updates to the app each month, something we’d like to make even more frequent! This, together with A/B testing, allows us to evolve the user experience incrementally. Change is still controversial, but we aim to avoid alterations that are too wide-ranging - the sort of thing that’s provoked a slightly negative reaction in the past:

We’re committed to supporting the latest the platform has to offer, and try to target new Android versions as soon as they’re out of beta. This isn’t always a painless process. As an example: the Oreo update exposed issues with our use of content providers, and the new notification channel interaction model continues to present us with challenges. But this commitment to staying up-to-date allows us to deliver features like Launcher Shortcuts soon after release, as well as taking advantage of performance and stability improvements.

As developers, we try to keep our coding practices current, too.

Writing great code

Like many other Android teams, we find a lot that’s useful in the basic Android development environment, but think some parts can be improved. Hence we augment the standard toolkit with a range of open source libraries.

We make heavy use of RxJava in our asynchronous code. This gives numerous benefits when compared to standard Android patterns like AsyncTask. Chains of functional operators allow us to transform data with fewer side effects. Multi-threading is easy to implement, and straightforward to stub in unit tests. And errors can be properly handled. For network requests we combine RxJava with OkHttp to retrieve and cache data in a flexible, robust and performant way.

A complex app means complex object hierarchies to manage. Here the dependency injection framework Dagger (well, Dagger 2) helps us out. Components are either annotated directly or referenced in configuration classes, and Dagger does the hard work of generating the boilerplate code to instantiate objects. It also can provide and maintain singleton instances of classes, allowing shared state without the testability issues of a classic approach.

We’ve also introduced Kotlin to the project. New modules that don’t incorporate legacy code are being implemented entirely in Kotlin; older modules use a pragmatic mix. Even in areas using Java heavily we’re seeing benefits; for example, using data classes to replace code that would previously have been generated using annotation-based libraries (in our case, AutoValue).

However, third party libraries don’t just allow us to write better code. They can also allow us to deliver user-facing features in a richer and more efficient way.

Better features, built faster

A great example of this is the approach we’re taking to add motion to the app. While the Android animation API has improved hugely over time, adding movement to buttons and other parts of the user interface still involves significant effort and understanding.

Here we make use of Lottie. Created by Airbnb, Lottie renders After Effects files as native animations that are included as easily as traditional static assets, and can even be hosted remotely. This allows the designers - an integral part of our team - to create complex transitions between UI states using software they’re familiar with. The exported animation is then simply referenced by the developer in an instance of LottieAnimationView. This supports animator-like interactions, so the ability to start, pause, resume and cancel. It also lets us observe state changes using AnimatorListener and AnimatorUpdateListener.

Hence we can add animations quickly and precisely, and in a way that allows changes to be made easily in the future.

Onwards and upwards

Our lives as developers are not, however, without challenges. The codebase of the current app began life in 2013, and was first released in 2015. To put that in perspective, your phone at the time probably looked something like one of these:

The Android build plugin at the time lacked unit testing support, multi-module builds were slow and required a lot of bespoke configuration, and singletons were fashionably cool. Well, maybe not cool - but they were certainly heavily used! As a result the current team inherited a monolithic codebase with minimal unit tests and a fairly loose architecture.

As discussed earlier, we’ve introduced techniques and components into the project that weren’t available during the incubation of the original codebase. Singletons have been replaced with injected dependencies, and we’ve made a lot of progress towards a cleaner codebase that’s easier to test and more resilient to change.

We’re now embarking on a new phase. The project is being restructured based on clean architecture principles with clear layers of responsibility. Distinct software functions - so things like data retrieval, business logic processing, or presentation - are finding new homes in separate decoupled modules.

So why are we doing this?

A big motivator is the ability to scale. As consumption has shifted from desktop to mobile, so the size and needs of our user base have grown. This creates a perfect storm: app complexity, team size, and the number of new features required have all increased - and so too has the risk associated with making changes across a monolithic, tightly coupled codebase.

A modular approach allows change to happen in isolation, with behaviour changes limited by strong contracts between components. Functionality can be tested with much less complexity: stub implementations replace real dependencies, with no need to worry about their inner workings.

Modularisation has other benefits, too. We’re able to create our different app flavours in a more flexible way; optional modules - maybe even built by a different team - can be included in a particular language variant through composition. Build time is reduced through improved incremental compilation. And it’s consistent with the approach required to create Instant Apps, something we’re excited about trying out in the future.

And it’s goodnight from me…

So that’s a brief look at the way we do News on Android at the BBC. We’ve explored the way we write code, and the challenges we meet along the way. But it’s worth returning to the why: our users. Meeting the needs of a diverse audience can be tough, but will always be outweighed by the reward of delivering trusted news to a user base of millions around the world.

Plus, we get to work with some great people. Even the ones with Apple phones!

Wish you were here?

If you’re an Android Developer, and all this sounds like an interesting challenge - come and check out our available roles! We do percent time, go to conferences, and get lots of training, so there’s plenty of opportunity for growth. There’s also often cake!