Showcase

We recently added BBC Radio to our portfolio of work for the BBC with a redesign and build project for its homepage.

Boasting 11 national and 46 regional radio stations, BBC Radio is renowned for having something for everyone. Its homepage is an incredibly important gateway to its stations for the millions of monthly radio website users and is becoming all the more so as the number of people who listen to radio via the internet increases year on year.  As a central hub for all BBC stations, visitors come to the Radio page to look for their favourite station, program information or simply to listen online – as such listeners need to navigate through the page and find what they want quickly and easily.

Having recently evolved the main bbc.co.uk site and its television pages, BBC chose Design UK as the agency to redesign the Radio homepage and bring it into line with its sister homepages. With a 1024 x 768 resolution, the new templates offer more space and flexibility than the Radio site’s existing templates which were limited by their defined width.

Armed with a working knowledge of the stringent BBC accessibility guidelines and their high technical specification requirements we set about creating a user experience that would meet the brief from a technical point of view, as well as improving usability.

Creatively our challenge involved incorporating all content from the old page whilst adding new features including podcasts, blogs and the BBC iPlayer. It also had to allocate space for station event promotion. A key complexity was displaying the branding of the ten BBC network stations, alongside World Service, and Nations & Local so that visitors can directly find their chosen destination or simply browse across them if they wish. Our solution was a fixed showcase of station logos across the top of the page where visitors can easily switch across stations and display the relevant, current and forthcoming programs in the promotional area directly below it.

The end result achieved all desired objectives offering an intuitive user experience. With a clean layout and more room for promotional messages it contains a large amount of content which is easy to browse and navigate. The majority of this content is driven by dynamic feeds so requires minimum updates making it hassle free for the BBC Radio teams. Especially challenging was the quick turn around of the project which we completed within the set timescales in the month before Christmas.

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