BBC News
Politics
BBC Politics provides in-depth coverage of all national and local UK elections, as well as selected international elections. It aims to inform the BBC’s audience about the process involved in selecting individuals to hold public office, and it also seeks to provide unbiased reports and visual representations about the outcome of that process.
Responsibilities
Design and development of reusable election page templates aimed at keeping users knowledgeable about election progress and ballot outcomes. All pages needed to be able to show live election data and support different languages.
––––
Provide landing page templates that accommodate promos for news, features, and results while also allowing for unique branding. Landing page designs needed to be able to support an editorial strategy focused on balanced coverage for all election participants.
––––
Collaborate with BBC engineers to create an array of results page components, including results banners, tables, maps, and charts for referendums, national elections, and international elections. To validate solutions quickly, multidisciplinary design sprints featuring ideation, iteration, guerrilla testing, and accessibility swarms were undertaken.
Responsive web
The responsive news rollout involved delivering a cohesive, cross-platform, and cost-effective news product that is rich and full of personality. It also sought to ensure that users receive an equal experience irrespective of their hardware, connection quality, or language.
Responsibilities
Design and delivery of article, topic, features, and image gallery pages for the responsive news rollout, ensuring they work across all devices and viewports; are flexible enough to show and promote distinct stories to national and international audiences; promote onward journeys using linked data; and remain consistent with their BBC Sport/BBC Weather counterparts.
––––
Examine future refinement and growth of the website, including extensive article page ideation, prototyping, and testing to ascertain how BBC News can inform users and tell challenging stories most effectively.
In-depth explorations of the news identity and how it can be used to add brand personality to responsive web pages.
––––
Explore alternative ways of engaging the audience using distributed content platforms and email newsletters.
––––
Refactor various design patterns and components, update style guides and best practice documents, and rework specialty pages (e.g., Special Reports, Market Data, and Newsletters). It was imperative for the responsive version to continue delivering the same high standard of content previously offered by the adaptive version.
Article experiment prototype (Proto.io).
World Service
The complexity of right-to-left Arabic languages and lengthy Cyrillic scripts, combined with unfamiliar social networks and global commercial considerations, produced a set of unique challenges when presenting content for 36 World Service websites within the BBC News framework.
Responsibilities
Review and test the stability of news pages and components when using Latin and Arabic scripts, and make any adjustments needed for a better non-English experience. This helped to ensure the smooth operation of all the BBC World Service responsive sites at launch.
––––
Provide a more recognisable means for global users to engage with the World Service team and with each other, specifically by incorporating international social media networks and online communities into the World Service product.
––––
Explore ideas for flexible BBC News templates that eliminate the need for bespoke pages and components when generating ad revenue on World Service and international sites. All solutions had to work equally for commercial and public service output without harming the BBC News brand.
Topic tag navigation prototype (Keynote).
Newsbeat
With its strong, vibrant brand and heavy emphasis on audio/video and social media, Newsbeat's reputation as the BBC's cutting-edge, youth-oriented news offering has continued to evolve with the establishment of a distributed content strategy; the adoption of a native app; and aspirations to introduce new and compelling storytelling techniques to users.
Responsibilities
Provide design advice and support, as well as stakeholder management, for the day-to-day running of the Newsbeat responsive site.
––––
Work with internal and external developers to improve the web user experience while also producing new concepts and page designs to help develop and strengthen the site.
––––
Continue design iteration of the Newsbeat app, ensuring that immediate tasks are completed to improve functionality and consistency across the iOS and Android versions.
––––
Investigate and define phase 2 of Newsbeat’s development, paying special attention to enhancements to navigation, article page iterations, and use of notifications.
––––
Help to implement Newsbeat's distributed content strategy by investigating the features offered by Facebook Instant Articles and determining whether the Facebook platform can cater for the Newsbeat brand, as well as editorial and user needs.
––––
Carry out all branding, design, and tech support tasks required to allow the editorial team to start publishing Facebook Instant Articles.