New BBC homepage is live
March 26, 2008 · Share This · Comment
The new BBC homepage launched a few weeks ago, after several months of public beta testing. The new design was improved based on feedback from the audience, a great example of how an open beta can improve the final product.
Bronwyn van der Merwe says:
We had an incredible response to our request for feedback on the new design. Thanks to everyone who sent us their thoughts.
It took us a while to work through all the comments, both from our feedback form, previous blog posts, and from blog posts across the web. The response was overwhelmingly positive; however, there were also some suggestions for improvements, reports of bugs and the odd insult!
We also engaged in a programme of extensive user and marketing research and testing to assess the site’s success both with new audiences and regular users of the site.
Taken all together, this gave us great insight as to where to go next.
When the design team returned after Christmas, we began in earnest making improvements, testing and iterating the design.
From a visual point of view, we reduced the size of the fonts, toned down some of the colours and created a more compact, space-efficient design.
Editorially, you’ll see new topics in the “customise your page” panel including Music, iPlayer and Business & Money.
Within some of the old modules, we’ve improved the offering, for example, we’ve added “listen again” links to the radio module and national sports feeds to the sports module.
There’s also more customisation: users can now choose the colour of the page, or leave it to rotate, picking up the colour of the main feature image.
We feel that running the beta page in tandem with the old homepage has been a great success and we feel that the new homepage is much stronger and more refined, thanks to your input over the last few months.
Stay tuned…. the BBC plans to roll out the new visual language to the rest of the BBC’s site. It will be interesting to see how this is incorporated into the BBC News site.
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