Digital Text

Earlier this week I was contacted about an old post on my last blog which discussed the new BBCi Digital Text service, available on Digital Satellite here in the UK. Apparantly I had upset a few people by giving my comments about the service.

Their comments about me where slightly unfair I think, especially as I said that the implementation was "the best example of any service of it's kind in the world". But still. constructive criticsm is hard to take sometimes I guess.

But just looking now for news on Aston Villa football club I notice that we are the only Premiership club that isn't listed. What's that all about? I know we aren't all that glamorous but please? You list Birmingham City.

Anyway, for those who may be interested, my previous BBC post is available below. With comments ON should anyone feel the need to discuss the service. Like I said though, I do love it, and am proud to have had some input despite it's minor flaws.

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So BBCi have finally released the new digital text service that I did some work on almost 8 months ago.

I am in the process of writing a full report on my thoughts, views and opinions of it's implementation (I left the BBC in December of last year - so had no input into the design or final usability/interaction), but wanted to jot down a few of my initial responses.

1) Take it to the bridge
The main 'bridge' appears on the right-hand-side of the screen when called. It felt initially a little dis-orientating to me, perhaps I expected it all on the left-hand-side, but I think this is too much of a personal response. This *must* have been an outcome of user-testing so I shan't dwell on it.

2) Mutli-color swap shop
The graphical style (colours etc) are 'channel specific'. Therefore BBC1 is a nice deep red, whilst BBC2 is purple and yellow. (I have no idea about the other BBC channels as 'the missus' was watching something on channel 4 last night so I had a limited 'advert' window in which to explore.

3) Programme model
The basic prinicpal behind the 'programme' model of information/content display is that the 'user/viewer' is offered *contextually related* links immediately. E.g. Whilst watching Newsnight, as a user, I am offered immediate Text News, links to Main news application AND Newsnight related information (contact details, web addresses etc). This was implemented superbly.

On the flip side however, when this contextualisation fails it fails terribly.

When watching a documentary on BBC2 last night, the only options available to me were; programme related information (contact details etc), Weather, Lottery, News and a link to the INTERACTIVE applications. I can only assume that these are the options available to the 'Entertainment' programme 'type'. However the only way I know this is because I was involved in designing the model. There was no visual identifier to let the user know that they are browsing an 'entertainment' type programme, so these options felt really spurious and random.

4) A to the Zizzle
The A-Z Index was way too long-winded to navigate. Conceptually this is a fantastic idea. Let me access all of my digital text/interactive content alphabetically e.g. so if I want film content I go to 'F'.

In practice this really didn't work as I had to navigate all of the pages one after the other. So I had to scroll down (or fastrack by scrolling up) eleven times before being able to click on the 'more' button, which only delivered the second page of 'A' related content.

I was responsible for the 'categorisation' of the BBCi website's content, and one of the main features we implemented then was the quick, direct linking through to the A-Z pages directly.

I can only assume that there were technical reasons as to why this hadn't been followed through. Which is a shame because I do have a series of 'letter' keys on my remote which enable me to toggle through to my required listing quite comfortably, as on Sky's EPG for example.

5) Where am I? How did I get here?
The dis-orientating jump between TEXT content and APPLICATION is still, err... dis-orientating.
This has been made a little easier with the introduction of a square icon which, after some trial and error I assume signifies 'an application will launch when clicked', but it wasn't made explicit to me. Which meant that I missed about a minutes worth of my favourite programme having to exit the News Video-wall application and go back to my chosen viewing.

So over all... a vast, vast improvement on the days of the 'i-bar' and the '24/7 home'. It is by far the best example of an iTV application of that scale that I have seen, but knowing what was planned and talked about from the team at BBCi assigned to the project it's obviously been 'watered down' somewhat from their original aspirations. And because of this, it still feels as if it's not *quite* there yet.

Having worked with the various departments/ stakeholders on the project it's obvious where the inspirational elements have come from, and equally apparant where it's faults lie. There is a lot expected of the user with the new application and I am sure over time I will learn the intricacies of the application. The question that remains though is...

...should I have to?

BBC Digital Text