THE PROBLEM
The BBC Music brand was established four years ago to amalgamate the vast amount of music content that is produced, broadcast and curated across all BBC networks - but it was hard to find the content you want due to the breath of content. Looking to improve the experience, the Music team sought to create a personalised, native experience, tailored to each individuals' musical tastes.
The project centred around three key areas: listening & watching, find & discovery and taste building. The first signed-in only experience for the BBC, it required the creation of an onboarding/cold-start sequence to get a general idea of the users musical tastes. This was extensively tested prior to launch to ensure a speedy, hassle-free entry. Being signed-in meant that we would be able to more accurately recommend content to each individual user, based on their listening and watching habits.
THE BRIEF
I was tasked as Lead UX to propose, create and deliver this experience, based off the pre-existing BBC Music website. Working alongside the product team, senior stakeholders and the external development team, Appadmi, the goal was to created a mobile and tablet experience that allowed users to create their personal slice of music from the BBC.
MY ROLE
This was a complete end-to-end process, I took the design from conception through to delivery - including strategy, concepting, workshops, prototyping, interaction-design, presentations, user testing, UI/visual design, asset delivery, QA and UX project planning and team management. As lead designer, I oversaw the work of one other designer who translated my mobile designs to tablet. It also required me to work with multiple cross-business teams on design pattern alignment.
The final onboarding process. Onboarding took up by far the most amount of time in order to get it right. It was a three step process to get a basic idea of what type of music the user was interested too, so that we can serve them a slice of personalised BBC Music content. It involved working with several other BBC teams to ensure cross product alignment and that the final pattern was reusable for other signed-in experiences.
THE OUTCOME
The product has been out for 18 months, has over 30,000 weekly users, and a dedicated and committed core user base. A large proportion of the design time was spent getting the onboarding process for new users just right. This resulted in my pattern being used as the foundations for the BBC GEL (Global Experience Language) onboarding pattern.
CREDITS
Tablet UX: Nourdine Arsalane