On March 23, BBC will unveil its new website.
The reason for the change: More and more users are accessing BBC on their tablets and mobiles.
The BBC therefore does not want to be stuck in the old “computer” era, and has decided to turn “responsive”
You will now see a BBC website customised for your device from Monday onwards. The code has been rewritten, and BBC will switch to a single database from where content will be broadcast to all devices – in a format that best suits them.
Mobile users will not notice the change, because BBC had adapted to mobile phones much earlier. It is the tablet users who will find the BBC site displaying better on their screens.
BBC editors are also using the opportunity to “clean house” – that is to make the site visually more pleasing. However, the changes are cosmetic in nature. They are not radical.
BBC had unrolled the beta version of its “responsive” website last December to get viewer feedback. Niko Vijayaratnam, BBC’s Senior Product Manager, in a blogpost identifies the changes based on user feedback as:
The colour of the summary font was felt to be too light so we have used a darker colour now.
The ‘ticker’ was important to you so we have introduced an updated version which now displays across all pages when there is a new breaking news alert instead of just on the front page
You wanted to be able to access the ‘Have Your Say’ section easily so we’ve added a ‘Share with BBC News’ link on all the section pages which will take you to this section.
A few things that have remained the same are:
- Length of the front page. The page will continue to be several screens deep.
- Content density is more or less the same
The most noticeable changes are:
- Cleaner, layout
- Bigger images
- Removal of Radio and TV buttons from the main navigation bar.The responsive design is a big step forward for a site that draws 2-3 million users every day. The Indian news sites should notice the change and become responsive.
The verdict is in – 95% of comments on the BBC blog are united in condemning this change to the BBC News website.
This clearly demonstrates the danger of proceeding with what you think the user community wants rather than using effective investigations before putting “pen to paper”. There is no substitute for listening to the user community when deciding on changes to any well established system. Change for change’s sake rarely succeeds.
This is going to prove a very embarrassing and costly white elephant for the BBC.