Thoughts on the beta of the BBC’s site redesign
The BBC have published a beta release of their newly redesigned homepage.
The new design has clearly been influenced by personal start pages like NetVibes, iGoogle and PageFlakes. You can select from a pre-defined list of BBC widgets to include on your homepage – the stuff you’d expect: News, Sport, Weather etc. The widgets can be customised – for example, selecting to see more or less news stories. You can also roll up or expand the widgets as well as move them around using drag-and-drop. This is pretty standard for personal homepage services. There’s a nice localisation feature – you enter your postcode and your news and weather is then set to your region which is a bit more slick than having to individually change settings for each widget individually.
There is a big chunk of the page taken up by a block that users cannot personalise – drawing attention to whatever the BBC want to promote at that time. This makes it a bit of a mish-mash of old style homepage where the editorial is determined by the publisher, and a personalised homepage where the user controls what they see.
For me, the big disappointment is the limited number of widgets. Where are the widgets for my favourite BBC TV programmes? And perhaps even more importantly, why can’t I add widgets from external websites to make this a truly customisable start page? I can’t even add RSS feeds from my favourite sites. It would also be nice to be able to grab the widgets from the page and then add them to another service.
Overall, it’s a bit of a walled garden approach to a personalised start page. It’s nice and simple perhaps for less web-savvy users who are happy to be limited to only BBC content but it lacks the open-ness of a proper start page. Most of the content available as widgets on this page can easily be added to one of the established personal homepage services out there without being restricted to BBC-only content, so its hard to see what the point of this new page actually is.
To take this to the extreme, you could question whether the BBC’s homepage is even important any more. We’re moving away from the idea of a website being a ‘destination’. I think that they should focus on further widgetising, RSSing and generally opening up their content for people to take away and use wherever they want it.
Tom wrote this on 16.12.07 – 5 comments
It's filed in the Design, Strategy, Widgets box
On January 4th, 2008 at 1:54 pm, Matthew Hill responded:
On a purely aesthetic level, I think it’s pretty hideous. Using Verdana as a readable body font is great, but I’ve always found it clunky and unnatractive for headings and this makes the site look childish and amateur. I don’t really like the changing colour scheme either; choose one and stick to it.
Being able to finally fully personalise the page is a good idea, but depending on where you move panels, the layout can get exceedingly screwy indeed and doesn’t really follow any logical flow. It’s possible to get one long column of panels — this really shouldn’t happen, they should auto float next to each other.
I’m glad to see that they’ve thought about non-Javascript users. The page is still usable if it’s switched off. I also like the Flash clock: not because it’s especially useful, but because it brings back nostalgic memories of earlier BBC branding. :-)
I’m not sure I agree with your last point Tom. Plenty of websites are only ‘destinations’ and will remain that way for a long time to come. Perhaps you should clarify the point about which types of sites you think no longer act as ‘destinations’?
On January 7th, 2008 at 10:17 pm, Joshua responded:
oh god so much to get my teeth into when i return the UK. WTF. BBC where? i love the old style BBC clock thats are far as i have got into the horror. what have you people been doing in my absence. im off for a monday patsy (party) ziens meisies (later girls)
On January 7th, 2008 at 11:25 pm, Only Connect » Communication That Evolves responded:
[...] the customisable widgets, it’s still a walled garden: the only content you can choose is BBC-generated content. Still, I would argue that retaining some [...]
On February 27th, 2008 at 12:40 pm, Andrew Banks responded:
Really don’t like the beta version and it look like they’ve actually gone live with it today. Technology wise it’s nice and I do love the functionality – it’s the design that drives me insane.
On February 27th, 2008 at 1:22 pm, Matthew Hill responded:
I’m trying to post some comments on the BBCs own blog about it and it continually hangs. I guess they are getting a lot of comments….