Rosie Lidington - BBC iPlayer Radio

Product strategy & Competitor Analysis

We gathered together the business objectives for the Play/Pause/Resume feature and My History page.

I looked at competitors and other services that allow play/pause/resume and syncing, including what has been done on iPlayer.

Sketching out the synching journey

As this involved a user picking up content seamlessly from different devices, I skectched out the journey a user would go on from Desktop to tablet to mobile, and back to Desktop again. This led me to get a really good understanding of what the user would be thinking at each point in the journey. Once I had done this I could build my ideas for features around this.

I came up with several solutions for how users could pick up content, the most obvious being a play bar at the bottom of the screen. This was not possible due to technical constraints so we had to find an alternative solution.

I also looked at our user personas and could see that this feature would meet the needs of 'Active Listeners.'

My History Page - Whiteboard Sketching

The product management team decided that they wanted to create a 'My History' page to allow users to pick up content they had previously been listening to. So I created sketches of the journey a user would go on to get to the My History page, and how they would pick up content between devices.

Sketch & Invision user journeys + Guerilla Testing

From the whiteboard sketches I created a user journey in Sketch, and Invision.

We then took the designs to the BBC Media cafe to see how people would react to the journey. This was very interesting. The main outcome was that people didn't expect or naturally think of going to a My History page.

This highlighted the fact that most people didn't know the MyRadio section of the site existed, and that we needed to do a lot of work on Onboarding people onto it for people to realise there were features such as My History even available.

User testing the final design

I made amendments to the design based on the findings from the Guerilla testing and we took the final designs and tested them in the lab.

Results & Summary

The user testing highlighted some key areas:

Users did not intuitively pick up that there was a My History page
Users went back to the episode page to pick up content - My History wasn't even on their radar
Users didn't see the mechanism we used to show people they could pick up content (the toast)
People didn't know about My Radio, and this compounded their lack of knowledge about the personalisation benefits
Much better My Radio Onboarding was needed to let users know about the personalisation features
Some other interesting things came out of the testing, such as users not liking the 'polished design' they saw a history page as more of a basic list than an interactive highly visual design.

Because of doing this testing ahead of building we uncovered the fact that users didn't really see the need to have a My History page and we avoided doing a lot of unecessary work.

Journey Mapping with the product team

Once we had the results, I fed them back to the product team and we did journey mapping around the product. We decided to focus on users picking up content from the episode page, rather than creating a My History page.

BBC iPlayer Radio My History & Play/Pause/Resume

"Allow users to easily find content that they have recently played & pick it up from where they left off."

Product strategy & Competitor Analysis

Sketching out the synching journey

My History Page - Whiteboard Sketching

Sketch & Invision user journeys + Guerilla Testing

User testing the final design

Results & Summary

Journey Mapping with the product team

Following this product I worked on an Onboarding project to assess how we could best onboard users to My Radio.

Take a look at my full portfolio of work

Get in touch!

Contact me or view my profile on LinkedIn

Or send me an email at rosielidington@icloud.com