BBC Collect

Internal BBC project name: STAPLER
Role: Senior User Experience Designer  | 2004-5

Team

• Project sponsor –  Julie Rowbotham
• Project team Members
  • Project Lead – Luciana Baptista
    
  • User Experience Design lead – Byju  Sukumaran
  • Interaction Designer - Gil Kahana
  • Editorial Lead – CBBC
    
  • Technical Lead – Jason Emmet
    
• New Media Research – Nicola Palfrey

Background

BBC Collect started out as proposition to give users access to BBC content when they wanted it and how they wanted it. It provided solid support for TV and radio programming by capturing users at the point of interest, and providing them with extended BBC content. It has the potential to drive people to the BBC from non-BBC environments for example in museums, outdoors events or printed media such as newspapers and magazines.

We conducted some participatory workshops to help define this service – we then created a prototype, which ran as a pilot for a week at London Zoo called "BBC Collect"

Objective

• To enable visitors to collect articles and AV material from the BBC archives directly to their phones at points of interest (Gorilla pen, Lion's lair etc)

• To enable the trial participators to access the articles and AV material on their home computer

Results

click on image to enlarge

We created a trial at London Zoo, using a scrapbook metaphor allowing Zoo visitors to create a digital record of their visit. The trial was aimed at children aged between 9-12 working with CBBC to help editorialise the available content.

We supplied each of the children with a mobile phone so that they could ‘zap’ the BBC collect signs (barcodes) placed around the exhibits. The barcodes corresponded to relevant AV content from BBC archives about each of the exhibits. This allowed the children to view movies, audio and text on their phone when they wanted it – and they could share this with their friends and watch again in the future.

This wasn't all – a unique URl was automatically created for each participant. So the zapped information was also available on a personalized webpage, keeping the things they collected at the zoo in virtual scrapbook of their outing.

The whole trial was hugely popular, and post trial interviews show that the participants retained and recalled a lot of the information from the archive material.

The BBC were able to successfully reuse material from their archives including Radio Four and brands such as Women's Hour, to new audiences (9-12 year olds) that would normally have been excluded via the normal broadcast distribution.

Read about the mobile trial at London Zoo: BBC_Collect3.ppt (5.5mb) [please email for more information]