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BBC Sounds - Personalisation

Discovering an intuitive and effective way to onboard users on to MyRadio and personalisation.

Gathering Stakeholder input

We started this project by running an exercise to get stakeholder input into Onboarding. This involved asking stakeholders to write their thoughts on post it notes under 4 different headings:
 

  • How can we make personalisation great?

  • Goals & Expectations for personalisation

  • Concerns and challenges

  • What do we need to do to keep up with our peers?

They were given 5 minutes for each heading. We then consolidated the feedback into themes.

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Personas and User Research

We then looked at the user personas that had been conducted by Foolproof to identify the core problem areas that users experience with personalisation.

We also looked at the research that had gone into creating the user personas, along with the research conducted by the marketing and editorial teams into audience engagement with personalisation.

This gave us a good insight into the key areas we could focus on when approaching the onboarding journey.

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Distilling the research and feedback

We took the feedback from Stakeholders and the user research and distilled this into key areas of focus for personalisation. These were:
 

  • Focus on the BBC USP

  • Allow teams to release quicker with less blockers

  • Improve the feedback loop that the user gets when they listen to content

  • Increase content engagement

  • Improve peoples awareness of MyRadio - i.e better onboarding

  • Improve the consistency across the whole experience

  • Improve sharing

  • Make personalisation obvious, intuitive and effortless

  • Give the user more control

  • Get recommendations right

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Crazy 8s and Beetles

We asked stakeholders to start by putting ideas around the statement on to post it notes. We asked them to stick them up o the wall and each explain them. We then asked them to do Crazy 8s - drawing ideas to solve some of the problems that came up in the post it notes. Once completed we asked people to dot vote on the ideas.

Once we had done the Crazy 8s we then asked the design team to expand the ideas by doing 'Beetles' which involved putting more thought into a specific idea and building it around a users needs.

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Top Beetle Ideas

The top four ideas that came out of the Beetle workshop were:

  • Daily Download

  • The Switcher

  • Mood Generated Radio

  • Personalised Dial Stations


From this we deciced to focus on one idea for Onboarding, which was Personalised Dial Stations.

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Defining user groups and creating a future strategy

From the discovery research and workshop I took all of the learnings and created a vision concept, which was based on where the product could be in 5 years time.
 

This helped stakeholders realise the potential involved and all of the opportunity involved in developing the platform.
 

I created a long term vision, and then described a way of getting there by defining core user groups that could be designed around one at a time - starting with one User Group to focus on first for MVP.
 

I presented this back to core stakeholder group in the US who helped inform the priority needs due to certain technology being switched off for users in the US. This allowed me to create a priority chart for the different user groups with Data Viewers as the first user group to design around.

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User Testing the Invision Concept Journey

I put the ideas from the previous workshops into an Onboarding concept journey and created a prototype in Invision.

The concept involved users building their own Radio station when they arrived at the iPlayer Radio homepage - or possibly the station homepage. They could go through and select options to suit the kind of listening experience they wanted. Once they had selected these options they would then have a radio dial with only their favourite radio stations, as well as a personalised stream of content that would play based on their preferences. They could also add to this content stream.

Once I had built the prototype I took it to the lab to test with users.

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Jobs As Progress framework to define Jobs To Be Done with a higher level motivations as a goal

I used a Jobs As Progress framework which I learnt about from an article by Alan Klement, who wrote ‘When Coffee & Kale Compete.’ I had always felt that JTBD was too simplified as a framework to define user needs, so this framework has really helped me develop user needs in a way that described higher level user motivations, and not just set of tasks that a user wants to complete.

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Onboarding Concept User testing Results

Creating the prototype and testing it with users gave us some amazing insight into how we might build on the ideas and develop an effective onboarding journey. Some key outcomes included:
 

  • The personalised dial was welcomed by the majority of users

  • Users felt that they could discover more content as they were easily able to switch between stations. Previously the stations were more hidden

  • It reminded them of a car radio experience

  • Users felt they wanted more of a community aspect to the experience, being able to follow people etc.

  • Although in the test it was easy to navigate through it might be a bit too much work. Users don't want to work for personalisation, they want it to be effortless and embedded in the experience.

  • More contextual guidance could be an option. E.g video walkthroughs etc.
     

This Onboarding concept gave the team incredibly valuable insight to create an effective My Radio Onboarding experience. By conducting the workshop, gathering ideas and thoughts from the business and the users, and then testing the concept we were able to generate a lot of really great ideas to move forward.

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