BBC Store: Mapping the experience
The challenge of grouping information scattered in a large multidisciplinary team
BBC Store was a video on demand service that opened the BBC Archive to consumers, allowing them to buy episodes or series of a show.
My role
As a Lead UX Designer I was responsible for the UX of BBC Store. I worked in close collaborations with Product, Engineering, Customer Support, Business and Marketing — including their design team.
Skills
- 🗺 Experience map
- 👨🏫 Workshop facilitation
The challenge
As I joined the team, I needed to learn more about our users. I found a lot of information documented, and the different members of the team were very knowledgeable.
How might we collect scattered informations in a single place to give a holistic representation of our user’s behaviours to the team?
However, all this information was scattered around, and no one seemed to have an holistic picture of our users’ behaviours and attitude toward our product. This made it difficult to have a clear vision of the key opportunities. To help reshape our strategy, I decided to create an experience map.
The approach
In order for the map to be an efficient communication tool, it had to be understood and owned by the team. To achieve this I decided to co-create the experience map with the team. Being experts with a wealth of domain knowledge, it made a lot of sense to involve them.
I started by creating a user journey that I used as a basis for the experience map. I then organised multiple workshops and asked the participants to complete each steps of the journey with what the users feel, think, wish, the pain points, and opportunities. Having a broad variety of stakeholders — from Product and Engineering, to Business, Marketing, Customer Support and Merchandising — made the results very rich. I then use research findings and data to refine the map.
The outcome
The map made key issues in the experience very visible. We could clearly see that a lot of effort was put to make the experience of discovering and buying content effortless (two top pictures). However, it degraded significantly after that, when watching or downloading shows (two bottom pictures). This was reflected in the data that showed a low retention rate.
Creating an experience map with the stakeholders was a great way to highlight the key pain points and business opportunities.
My recommendation was to focus on improving the watching experience in order to increase our retention rate. Shortly after that I moved to a different project, but my recommendation was followed.
The map also helped us when designing other aspects of the product such as the homepage and the product’s pages.
Conclusions
Building an experience map was a great way to collect all the data scattered around in one central place. It helped us pinpoint key user frustrations and strategic opportunities.
As we built it together with our key stakeholders, it made the map very effective at influencing. Everyone understood where the results came from and agreed with my recommendations.
Using visual sketches made the map easy to understand. It grabbed the attention of many people and helped raise awareness and promote User-Centred Design throughout the department.
Disclaimer: This article represent my personal views and not those of the BBC.
