ia play

DG’s video of Media & Everyday Life represents big media with pictures of the ecclesiastical Broadcasting House. Not sure what David would think of our BBC building, the Broadcast Centre. It looks more like a warehouse than a church. And White City building looks a bit like it should be in Gotham City.

Lego features, of course, in the form of Lego gardens (combining two of my favourite things!) to show the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

And towards the end David talks about Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman and his theory that craftsmanship gives a sense of well-being. The Craftsman has been on my wishlist for a while and I’m having to fight the urge to go on a book buying splurge.

I’ll be presenting at the IA summit in April with Margaret Hanley, Anne Stevens and Henning Fischer on Developing junior programmes in UX teams.

This year’s summit is in Miami. Since last year the conference was in Las Vegas, I can’t be the only CSI fan expecting to hear that the IA Summit 2009 will be in New York.

We’re looking for information architects at the BBC. We’re looking for mid-career IAs at the moment, although it is likely that junior and senior roles will follow.

Priorities for us in the next year are search, mobile, contextual navigation/recommendations, an assorted mix of programme-related products (iPlayer, archives, /programmes/) and IPTV. So it is likely this roles will end up working in these areas.

Given the spirit of this blog, I’d be interested to hear from people interested in working from home, part-time, job-sharing etc.

You can find the job spec (search for job ref 297698) and apply at the BBC jobs site. Applicants need to be able to work in the UK already.

(disclaimer: our IA team isn’t responsible for the intriguing navigation design or the search engine of the jobs site)

The BBC is rather unusually funded but I’ve never actually read the Royal Charter before. The Queen’s feelings about Tessa Jowell were surprising:

“AND WHEREAS the period of incorporation of the BBC under the 1996 Charter will expire on the 31st December 2006 and it has been represented to Us by Our right trusty and well beloved Counsellor Tessa Jowell, Our Principal Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, that it is expedient that the BBC should be continued for the period ending on the 31st December 2016”

Of more practical use perhaps was the definition of ‘licence fee payer’ which was surprisingly relaxed:

“57. The meaning of “licence fee payer”
In this Charter, a reference to a “licence fee payer” is not to be taken literally but includes, not only a person to whom a TV licence is issued under section 364 of the Communications Act 2003, but also (so far as is sensible in the context) any other person in the UK who watches, listens to or uses any BBC service, or may do so or wish to do so in the future.”

I’m a week into a new year of work. The weather has been sodden all week and the London transport system seems to have had one too many sherries over the festive system. None of this helps fill me with the joys of returning to work, particularly since I took an unusually indulgent two & half weeks off.

That said, things are looking rosy. 2007 saw a few changes around bbc.co.uk:

A new homepage. Only a beta in 2007 though and it needs more interesting boxes (recipe search!). Pink is still my least favourite colour. The black is surprisingly nice, particularly with the Signs of Life promo (I can’t link to the combo – there’s no archive yet but it is on the list).

iPlayer is kicking off its nappy and wandering around. “Perhaps television’s multimedia future has arrived” is the Guardian Media Diary‘s response; both non-commital and grandiose at the same time . Anyway I love the instant gratification of streaming (and that works in Firefox).

/programmes/ – the basic architecture is there but it needs elevators, some more furniture, and a lick of paint. This unassuming product is a huge step forward for us. For years, vast quantities of BBC programmes had no presence on the website at all and pretty much everything that was there had to be hand-cranked by dedicated web teams.

Identity (login, member pages, recommendations even) looks set to be the thing for 2008. It’s been the thing before (2004 and 2006, I believe) but every idea has it’s time. If we can resurrect MyBBC then why not?

Metadata should finally cease to be a management buzzword and so I reckon we should see some really interesting metadata work happening.

But I’m still glad it is Friday

The recent flurry of 10th birthdays experienced in the web world really shouldn’t be surprising given the internet baby boom of the late 90s. So in 2007 we’ve celebrated weblogs, Google.com (but not according to Google) and the 10th anniversary of bbc.co.uk.

Last December I wrapped up the year with the Freepint article Five Years of Information Architecture. This year for Freepint’s 10th anniversary I’ve contributed to A Decade of Find, Use, Manage, Share with Marcy Phelps, Tim Houghton and Jessica Lipnack.

I’m looking forward to lots more working with Marcy and all the lovely Freepint folk in the new year.

Jim Ramsey writes at A List Apart about designing for flow (challenge carefully balanced with your abilities) rather than ease of use. I was very excited to find someone applying Csikszentmihalyi’s theories to web design. And even more so to find Jim tackling the keep-it-simple/making-the-complex-clear debate:

“The goal should not necessarily be to create a simple site. The goal should be to create a site that feels painless to use no matter how complex it really is. But wait, you might be thinking, hasn’t there been a simplicity movement in web design over the last few years? Yes, but there’s a learning curve for any site that seeks to solve a complex problem. We shouldn’t confuse simplicity with a desire to avoid needless complexity.”

Blackbeltjones was also bemoaning the tendency to stick with ‘don’t make me think’ in design and set himself the goal to create services that ‘scamper between beautiful extremes‘ of designs to be glanced at and those to be pored over.

Ramsey’s four flow-based rules reminded me of one BBC team’s (unsuccessful) iPlayer pitch which began with the analogy of a remote control with the more advanced buttons hidden, concealed from everyday use. We have a tendancy never to build those advanced buttons because most of the users (and/or our target users) never use them but we have to remember that simplicity is only one reason that evangelists evangelise.

It has been a long time since the ‘glass-wall‘ redesign of the BBC homepage. We have tweaked it here and there in the interim but it was definitely looking tired.

Last week we opened up the new version to the public, hopefully to replace the existing homepage shortly: http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/

I won’t go into the overall concept as Richard has covered most of it at rxdxt. The clock was an interesting concept for an IA as it was quite consciously and overtly not meant to be useful. We know you all have the time on screen already. It is just there to make you feel warm and fuzzy.

From a navigation point of view we’ve quite consciously stopped trying to be all things to all people. The old homepage was laden with links and many of them heavily under-used, a consequence of a remit to promote the depth and breadth of the site. The new version is more focused around regular tasks (and even more so if you customise it) and promotions.

Given the volume of traffic this page receives, it has been an interesting journey to sell the concept that the depth and breadth are best promoted in other ways but one that has been mostly successful. Over the next year I’m hoping to see a much greater focus on contextual navigation, recommendations and search as ways of surfacing the content.

We’ve still got work to do on that directory but that comes later…

The BBC’s Innovation Labs are back on. This year’s Labs are aimed at “independent new media & vision companies in … Scotland, North East England, North West England and Wales & West Midlands”.

The labs provide

• Participation in an intensive creative workshop with peers and expert mentors
• An opportunity to pitch a project to BBC New Media commissioners
• Access to business advice, mentoring and development finance from other sources
• Retention of any IP that they develop
• A £5,000 fee for each of the selected teams

We’ve been trying to come up with a new org structure for our website and every plan we’ve come up with so far has included categories that on closer reflection turn out to just be miscellaneous categories re-branded.

Alongside the meaningful stuff like ‘programmes’ and ‘news’ we’ve got ‘about’ which is just a bucket for corporate information and other pages we have to have on the site but the audience isn’t necessarily looking for. At the moment we’ve also got ‘innovation’ which is a bucket of new stuff that doesn’t fit in the current org structure. And then there is ‘products’ which wouldn’t necessarily be a miscellaneous category for another organisation but for us it means things we make that aren’t TV or Radio programmes.

Might need to have a re-think.