A New Way of Curating
In previous posts my colleagues Lloyd Shepherd, Bethan Jinkinson and Simon Williams have introduced BBC Ideas and some of the thinking that has come out of the audience research the BBC has conducted into the field of thoughtful, shortform, factual content. In this post I’ll talk about some experimentation we did at the end of last year to come up with new ways of curating BBC factual content online. We called this experiment the Curation Prototype.
When we started the experiment, most content on bbc.co.uk was organised in traditional ‘categories’. For instance, on BBC iPlayer it looks like this:
On BBC iPlayer Radio it looks similar:
As more and more users are signed in using BBC ID, personalisation is becoming more important to content discovery. However there are three more traditional ways of discovering content which remain crucial to users:
1. You know the name of the programme and you use Search or the alphabetical index to find it
2. You know what TV channel or radio station you want content from and you go to their homepage to browse their featured content.
3. You know what category you would like content from (Arts, Documentary, Science & Nature etc.).
Yet our actual consumption of content tends to be significantly less tidy than these models allow for. I’m a 30-year-old man from Dublin living in London. When I listen to content on my phone it’s either in the form of podcasts or radio programmes on demand — things like Soul Music or In Our Time from Radio 4 or The Listening Service from Radio 3. I stick on 6Music live when I’m in the kitchen at home, but sometimes switch to Radio 1 for Annie Mac or Huw Stephens. If I have an hour in the evening, I might pick up on a drama series. I loved some of the programmes from BBC Four’s Japan Season. Top of my Facebook feed every morning I skim through video content from BBC Three and BBC Scotland’s The Social. It’s a very mixed bag.
The television channel or radio station that content is made by doesn’t strictly correlate with whether or not it will appeal to me. The Great British Bake off wasn’t specifically made to appeal to a younger audience, and yet it was really popular with them. Equally, the ‘category’ box that a piece of content falls in to doesn’t always tease my curiosity. If I had describe some of my main interests I might say I liked ‘Arts’ , ‘History’ and ‘Documentaries’, but who doesn’t find Planet Earth fascinating? Or enjoy picking up some facts about Mars from William Shatner?
(…the largest mountain in the solar system is on Mars and three times bigger than Mount Everest.)
So, if you’re not fussy about what channel or station made a particular show, you don’t know the name of the thing you’re in the mood for and you don’t really care what category it falls into as long as it’s interesting, how do you find it?
With the Curation Prototype we set out to find alternative ways of organising content. A pan-BBC group was formed to collaborate and pull together expertise from across the corporation: Mary Hockaday (Controller, World Service English); Cassian Harrison (Channel Editor, BBC Four); Mohit Bakaya (Commissioning Editor, Radio 4); Mark Friend (Controller, Radio & Music Multiplatform); Robert Ketteridge (Head of Arts, Documentaries & Drama, BBC Radio); and Elizabeth Lane (Research Manager, Marketing & Audiences). The group met fortnightly to oversee the work and share insights from their respective areas of expertise.
We began by looking at existing audience research from other parts of the BBC that could save us time. Research and previous projects from Radio 4 were particularly informative, as was learning from the curation experience and copywriting skills of the BBC Homepage team in Salford. This team brings together content from across the BBC daily in categories like “How, what and why” and “Real Life Stories”.
We wanted to come up with some new ways of curating content in the form of new categories to appeal to 25–44 year olds looking for thoughtful and thought-provoking content, primarily on their mobiles.
We built a really simple testing website, assembled around 50 pieces of content, and used it to curate four types of playlists. We then asked a sample of 30 participants from across the UK aged between 25 and 44 to use the website in their own time and asked them questions about their usage.
The most popular playlist by far was one called ‘Wise Up’, which featured a multi-genre selection of short thought-provoking factual content — stuff like:
These playlists mixed together things from different parts of the BBC — for instance, a BBC Radio 3 video about the connective force between music and feelings sat alongside a four-minute video recut from David Attenborough’s Natural World series. Neither are necessarily content you would go looking for but both are interesting and give you something to think about.
We didn’t label any of the content with its category or original channel brand. Our instinct was that while genre categories appeal to some people who self-identify as ‘an arts lover’ or a ‘science nerd’, the genre label as a route to discovery was actually more of a barrier than an enticement.
This seemed to ring true in the research. One participant told us he watched a video on the Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni (a short video re-cut from BBC Four’s ‘Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art’) because the title caught his attention:
He said he never would have normally watched a full arts programme but having watched that one short video he was interested in finding out more. It seems a lot of people, for whatever reason, think a particular genre is not for them, although they probably would enjoy a lot of the content within those categories were it organised and packaged differently. Some of the new curation categories we were creating were a step in the direction of trying to do just that. Here’s some of the things research participants said:
“It kind of ignites the spark in you where you want to have a debate or you want to learn something about what is actually going on in the world. I would definitely recommend this website to a friend, I think it’s really great”
Female, 25 years old
“The content included was good, well organised, a broad range of topics, which I really like, and the way the videos are described is there to always grab your attention so you want to find out more. Thumbs up.”
Male, 23 years old
The ‘Poo in a can’ case above is also a good example of the difference an attention-grabbing headline can make in tempting someone to hit play. While not wanting to stray into the territory of click-bait, it is still important to pique curiosity and spell out why something is worth watching.
What came out really clearly from the participant feedback was that users enjoyed the surprising and eclectic variety of the content and it led to discovery of content they wouldn’t have otherwise thought to watch.
This led to the insight that BBC Ideas shouldn’t be a platform you go to to find out about a ‘particular interest’, but rather a place you go to find stuff that is ‘particularly interesting’.
