How Service Design helped us unify the BBC editorial tools’ experience
Shifting from product focussed teams to collaborative platform thinking
When you read an article on BBC News or watch your favourite show on iPlayer, have you ever thought about how those pages get created? Probably not! That’s where the BBC Systems and Service Design (S+SD) UX team comes in. Content get created by our teams of Journalists and Editors. They do this using a set of tools that we often build in-house. This project is about how we took an holistic approach to improve the service as a whole.
My role
Each members of the S+SD team, is embedded in a product team working on an editorial tool. My role was to lead the UX for iSite, BBC’s main CMS. As a UX team, we would frequently meet to share our work. After a few months, it became clear to me that we should be collaborating closer together. I organised a few successful initiatives to do so, and I became more and more involved in bringing the different tools closers together.
Key skills
- 🗺 Service blueprint
- 🎯 Strategic thinking
- 👀 Observation study
- 👫 Multidisciplinary cross-team collaboration
The challenge
While conducting contextual enquiries on our respective tool, we observed that the Journalists and Editors had to use all our different tools together to publish content online. They didn’t perceived the tasks they performed as separated in the way the tools were. Having to switch tools made the process inefficient and painful. It distracted the Editors from doing their main job: create the best content for our audience.
We agreed that solving this challenge would require us to closely collaborate and dig into our Service Design toolkit. However, we quickly realised that collaboration between UX Designers wouldn’t be enough. In order to be able to implement a more unified experience across our tools, we had to get the different Product teams to collaborate with one another.
How might we encourage Product teams to collaborate to create a unified experience across the editorial tools?
The approach
Get buy in from Senior Management
We started by looking at how we could shift the management’s perceptions of the tools, from being individual products to being a service. First, we presented our findings to our Head of Design to get her support. Having her on board helped us get the Director of Platform and the Senior Product Managers from all the different tools together in a room to present our findings.
Our presentation was very well received and became a triggered for many discussions that materialised into the creation of a new strategy focusing on taking a platform approach. This was the perfect opportunity for us to contribute to the strategy by highlighting how Service Design could support platform thinking.
Holistic research using Service Design
The first part of our UX strategy was to collect more insights on how Journalists create and publish content. In the past, our research focussed mainly on the editorial tool we we working for. With the new strategy, we now had the mandate to research across touch points, focusing on how Journalists switch between them.
We conducted some in-depth observations, following a few journalists during their shift and collected data about the multitude of tools, products and things they were using to do their job. One thing that particularly struck us was that, for each type of media they wanted to add to an article (e.g. image, video, audio) they had to use a different tool. This was a key pain point for the Journalists. We used our findings to create a service blueprint highlighting all the different touch points and how frequently people had to switch between them.
We used the blueprint with the Senior Management, to helped them visualise the key pain points: switching between tools. After a few discussions, we agreed that we should first tackle the problem around passing information — such as an image — from one tool to another. This was a big challenge to tackle. To solve those kind of platform issues, the Product teams would have to be restructured. As it seemed to be a long and heavy process, we suggested to use a Design Sprint to kick start the approach and test out cross-team collaboration.
Kick start cross team collaboration
A few weeks later, we were ready to start a 5 days Design Sprint to solve the challenge of having to switch tools for each type of media a Journalist wants to add to an article. It was the first time Developers, Product Managers and Designers from different tools were working together!
How might we make it easy for Journalists to add different types of media from different tools to an article?
Outcome
The goal of the sprint was to do both: test a concept with Journalists and build a proof of concept to show our idea was technically possible.
The winning idea was the Smart Drawer. It linked all the tools closer together by bring content from other tools — such as a video — into the tool you’re currently in. Together with the developers we also wrote some code showing how the metadata will be shared between the tools.
The results of the usability test were very positive and we proved that our solution was technically feasible. As a result, a new team was formed to keep on the work, improve the design and start the implementation.
Conclusions
Using Service Design methods, we generated research insights that allowed us to change the Senior Management’s perception of the tools, from being individual products to being an holistic service provided to our Editors and Journalists.
Using Service Design helped us change Senior Management’s perception of the tools
We were also able to help the Senior Management kick start the platform approach by using a Design Sprint to help teams start collaborating. As a result, the teams were reorganised to accommodate collaborative platform work and build micro-services, bringing a lot of benefits for the users.
Using a Design Sprint helped kick start a team reorganisation
Disclaimer: This article represent my personal views and not those of the BBC.
