Rework It: Habitual, Better, Faster, Streamlined
Bringing the BBC Sport App into 2020
Okay, so I know 2020 hasn’t been great so far. Reese Witherspoon sums it up well for me…
But it can’t be all bad.
We, the engineers of the BBC, have been hard at work trying to modernise and streamline our services so that you, the general public, can have faster and more informative access to the things you know and love. Be it Football, Rugby or even the more obscure and underrated sports like Alpine Skiing and Curling.
Historically, the BBC has been a very traditional medium for people to access information about current events, in particular, sports. Whilst this is still one of the major draws to the BBC, we are very aware that the way people find content is changing.
In a world geared towards social media, more and more people are looking to sites like Facebook and Instagram for their sports and news updates. According to a report published by Ofcom, although BBC One is the main source of news for most people, Facebook was also widely used by 35% of the participants.
At the BBC we have apps that have been around for close to a decade now, namely the BBC News and BBC Sport apps. Given that a decade is nearly an eternity in terms of software, it’s safe to say that there was definitely space for us to improve.
“So, what are you going to do about it?”, I hear you ask…
Introducing Native Topics
No, the BBC Sport app obviously isn’t going to become the next social network. However, we can make our content more amenable to an audience who like to get their sports updates in a format similar to that you’d find on a social network.
So how did we do it?
First and foremost, we needed to get our Content Management System (CMS) away from our local legacy servers and get it working on the Cloud. This was no small task and is still ongoing. But in doing this, we can make our responses faster and more reliable. An added benefit of this is that, as the Sport App team, we are now able to render pages natively instead of using WebViews! This has handed back control to us and has allowed our User Experience (UX) designers to start creating a more mobile friendly experience.
Secondly, what is a Native Topic? In a nutshell, it’s an index (or topic) that contains many articles or other media, for example at the BBC we have a topic for Rugby League and most Football teams, eg Norwich. An example of what you may find on a topics page is a list of articles all about the given topic that you can navigate to from the topic page.
You might be thinking “well okay so they look different, but is that seriously all you’re offering me?”. From the video above, you can see that our new, shiny pages load a lot faster than their web counterparts. This is for two main reasons, the first being that the service we need to render these pages lives on the cloud, which makes it much faster to access and easier to scale up. The second reason is because now we aren’t opening up what is essentially a “mini-browser” inside the app to show you these pages, we are taking advantage of the Android and iOS frameworks to display this content. In doing this, we have made topics load more than six times faster and reduced the amount of data and battery power you need to use the app!
So, what’s next?
Well, there are potentially thousands of topics that need to be rendered and some of those contain things we haven’t considered yet (for this reason, these topics are still web views). One of the biggest examples of this is the topics pages for football leagues, eg the Premier League. We need to make new elements for these to be rendered natively, for example a league tables component, so you can see where the teams in the league are ranking. But, going back to “the BBC apps are old”, we want to improve instead of just keeping it the same. So we’re working towards a more entertaining, valuable experience for our users and hopefully soon we will be able to support every topic page natively.
So that’s basically it, but for those who didn’t want to read it all:
TL;DR: We moved our service to the cloud, did some fancy new designs and made our app super fast.
