From 'My News' to 'My Reads' on BBC News: an experiment
📅 2022-23
✏️ UX design, UI design
👥 Solo project
Case and Brief
During the dawn of the war in Ukraine, while keeping informed over the BBC News app, I’ve noticed some bumps in the reading experience following breaking news, live coverage and top stories about the overall war topic.
In particular, when opening a “Breaking News” notification, it was hard to find that specific highlight within articles that were in constant review by the authors, and it was then impossible to trace back what articles were read, which were updated after one’s reading, and what were the points in common among related articles.
From my personal frustration, in the next months I tried to apply some edits to the BBC News app, in order to fix this specific use case.
The challenge
This was an inevitably biased exercise, as I was the only user I was designing for. My main assumptions were:
More users face the same struggle
Stories are rigidly organised in topics by BBC News authors and editors
“Live” tag indicates something different from a “breaking news” and also from a “developing story”
To keep a more objective outlook on the project, I challenged myself to create a persona with behavioural archetypes that summarised my own.
Overall, the aim of the project was:
To provide a visual clue for readers to recognise what articles were still under development
To explore a topic in an organised manner, and to build a “reading history” to go back to at a later stage.
Research and Insights
Persona: Selective reader
Needs: quick access to what they look for (from notification); an organised view over what they read on the topic, not the whole topic
Goals: to read only some in-depth stories; to form their own overview of the topic
Context: actively checks every notification, lands on app from notification, no homepage view
Behaviour: selective reader: selects what detail story or in-depth analysis to read out of a big topic; jumps from article to article
Based on the assumption that I’m not the only BBC News reader facing the same struggle, I summarised my goals & needs in a persona with the archetypical behaviour of what I defined as “selective reader”.
I then thoroughly audited the current UX with the flow from notification panel through home screen to “My Reads” screen, highlighting pain points and frictions.
From there, I formalised my problem statements and addressed each with a quick idea on features that might solve them.
Solution
Thanks to the quick ideation exercise after defining multiple, punctual problem statements, it was easy to sketch few screens. My focus was on design patterns to enrich existing pages, and I chose to not undertake a style & brand redesign for such a clear and recognisable institution: what the BBC News app needed was an enriched user experience that gave a more traceable reading flow to the reader, not a different news reading app.
The Topic screen is all new, and basically acts as a newspaper front page focusing exclusively on the selected topic. As a first iteration, in it I decided to feature a top horizontal scroll with just a few top stories, and then a vertical scroll with all of the articles that are part of that bigger storytelling.
The new Article screen features:
A tag indicating whether it’s complete content or still subject to updates
A topic tag that links to a topic-focused page
A string of topics that are related to the main one
A “Focus” tab featuring the main content, and a “Related” tab featuring a list of other topic tags and stories to continue reading.
While the My Reads screen originally featured topics and stories arbitrarily selected (possibly by an algorithm) by BBC for the reader, my version acts as a history record instead. It’s complete with filters by main topics and by timeframe, in order to go back to all the content that was previously read by the user.