Red Badger is bursting with creativity... and makes the complicated straightforward
Nine million people visit the BBC Homepage each week but most use it as an access point to specific information and miss lots of valuable and relevant content. And, although personalisation tools are available, less than 10% of visitors use them.
Tasked with finding new ways to engage consumers, BBC Connected Studio was looking for creative ideas that would make it easier for visitors to the site to find content relevant to them.
Connected Studio was looking for smart ideas that could be built and tested quickly - the kind of challenge our rapid prototyping model is made for.
Cain Ullah, co-founder, business operations, Red Badger
The concept Red Badger came up with was effectively a fast lane. A real-time stream of BBC content delivered to the homepage, in bite-sized chunks, the instant it’s published.
Combining this with the semantic web, allowing data to be shared across platforms and communities, means the content is refined as the site ‘learns’ more about what a user accesses and how they interact with it.
The concept appealed because it allowed us to showcase much more content without overcomplicating the existing site. Plus the feed learns from the user's behaviour and becomes more and more personalised the more it learns.
Eleni Sharp, senior product manager, Homepage, BBC Connected Studios
For Connected Studio the key metric was the feedback from consumers and overall the reaction was very positive. The concept was proven to be easy to understand, and more than 75% of users agreed the concept was appealing; nearly 50% said they would be very likely to use BBC Now if it went live.
BBC Now has generated a lot of interest and we are already looking at how we can integrate some of the themes into the site moving forward. We are committed to delivering the best customer experience we can and we believe that innovative new products and platforms are central to this.
Eleni Sharp, senior product manager, Homepage, BBC Connected Studios
