BBC News website redesign – comments from editors and designers

Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News website:

What’s new:
• a fresh, updated design, with more space for the main stories of the day
• better use of video and images
• clearer and more prominent labelling and signposting of key stories, whether you are on the front page or a story page
• a better indication of which are the most recent headlines
• easier ways to share stories with others, for those who wish to, on social media networks

As I also mentioned in my earlier post, some important things are staying just the same, for example:
• all the content is still there: the best of the BBC’s journalism in text, audio and video?
• the latest news headlines will be as quick and comprehensive as ever ?
• accuracy remains at the core of our editorial values?
• we’ve been careful to keep things simple and easy to use; you have told us how important this is

From: BBC News website redesign (2)

Paul Sissons, UX Team Lead, BBC Future Media & Technology:

Fundamental to the new GVL is bold, strong type and crisp, un-cluttered layouts. The gradients and textures of “Web 2.0” are gone, and everything is pared down to the minimum required for delivering news.

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With an incentive, users will scroll. If that proves a positive interaction, it’s something that could become habitual. So rather than design our indexes and front page with everything at the top of the page, we are encouraging scrolling by putting richer content within stories and towards the bottom.

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Across the project, there was a concern that larger images, bolder headlines and more links could make pages overbearing. Having a column of white at the right-hand side of a story’s body was one of the design decisions made explicitly to counter this.

From: BBC News website redesign: telling the story

Erik Huggers, Director of BBC Future Media & Technology:

This has been a major engineering project for the Future Media and Technology Division and I believe it’s a great example of engineering and design working hand in glove with editorial – a way of working that I talked about at the Media Guardian Changing Media Summit earlier this year. To give an example we have improved the content management system, which will make it easier for journalists to upload their story and add video and pictures to it more quickly and gives them better control of the layout.

From: BBC News website redesign