Announcing the New BBC Design Research Roster
In January this year, we wrote about the call to join our new BBC UX Design Research roster. (You can read all about it here).
Today, I am really pleased to be announcing the new BBC UX Design Research roster and their first assignments with us. After a rigorous and creative process, we have selected eight agencies that we are committed to working with for at least the next 2 years.
We had a very strong response from the research industry, with over 40 agencies applying to join the roster. The standard we saw from them was excellent: we were spoilt for choice and want to acknowledge that there were a great many unsuccessful agencies that produce extremely high quality research.
We were keen to take a creative approach to the process, giving the agencies a chance to shine whilst making sure they understood our needs and objectives, all while making sure we adhered to the European Public Contract Regulations and BBC Procurement guidelines. We achieved this balance by basing much of the assessment on a research brief, and the responses we saw from all the agencies that we invited to tender were interesting, engaged and inspiring. The process enabled us to select an extremely talented roster with a wide diversity of capabilities, backgrounds and approaches.
We see our research commissions as collaborations between the agencies and our internal research specialists. For this reason, we set up packages of work in different specialisms to allow us a more discursive working relationship with agencies, where we can understand each other’s perspectives, insights and expertise over time.
The agencies and their initial assignments are as follows:
- Deloitte Digital — Strategic UX & Market Data
- Hetco Design — Emerging Behaviours
- Join the Dots — Product-Informing Research
- Modern Human — Internal Audiences & Service Design
- Revealing Reality — Ethnography & Hard to Reach Audiences
- Sutherland Labs — International Research
- System Concepts — Accessibility Research
- What People Want — Rapid Iterative Research
The roster we’ve procured offers us a wider diversity of specialisms than we’ve had previously, which allows us to explore new ways to understand our audience.
We are looking forward to starting work with our new external colleagues over the next few months.
