Pages from BBC News Online

With the delivery of our brand new responsive design website, our coverage of events such as the Diamond Jubilee and the US Presidential elections, 2012 was a huge success in News for what we call our 'Four Screen strategy'.

In the UK alone we saw a 28% increase in weekly unique browsers to our websites and applications, the number of tablets accessing our product more than trebled following a massive increase during Christmas week and there has been a 50% increase via smartphones.

Considering that one-third of our users are now not using a desktop PC it is essential that we continue to deliver great experiences across all devices from phones to connected TVs - not only in 2013 but beyond.

This is where Connected Studio comes in.

It's not that people don't want to see the big major stories that affect us all and the BBC is committed to ensuring it uses its editorial skills to ensure the world is well informed about the things that really matter to the broadest audience.

However, people are increasingly interested in lots of different topics which affect their own personal daily lives and we think we can do a better job in the future allowing you to follow stories that interest you across multiple devices.

So this is the focus of our Connected Studio initiative - discovering ways to consume and distribute news that is more relevant to people. That might be news about where you live or where you work or what happens on the commute between the two places. Or it might be news about the industry you work in, or something that directly affects friends and family. Or just news about your hobbies and what interests you.

We have a great opportunity to build on the systems and products BBC Online built for the Olympics in 2012 and use linked data to describe our content and make it easier to find.

Our journalists are starting to tag stories accurately for the location, people, companies and organisations that they are about and then by linking this data together we will be able to make it possible for you to find and follow the news that affects you.

Where our current local news sites only offer a limited view of the world in those areas, in future we will be able to surface stories about companies who employ lots of people in an area.

Or when an MP has said something in the House of Commons which features on Democracy Live we will be able to show it immediately to people in the area that he or she represents and also to all the people interested in that subject.

We also want to work with the wider media industry to link to other people's content more effectively in the same way.

The Connected Studio is an opportunity for people from outside the BBC to meet up with experts from our teams, to play with our data and develop product ideas and prototypes which we will show to real audiences during the day.

We are hoping to hear from many people across the media and digital industry who would like to get involved and help us with this exciting challenge.

I look forward to seeing many interesting people gathering to help us on January 21 in the heart of the BBC's new journalism headquarters at New Broadcasting House in London. A creative brief for the studio has been published and you can sign up here.

Chris Russell is head of product for BBC News Online.

The BBC News mobile site responsively adapts to a tablet

As Head of Product I am responsible for the way in which we deliver BBC News to people on desktop computers, mobile phones, tablet devices and televisions connected to the internet or red button, the four screens of our BBC Online strategy.

If you're one of the large and rapidly growing number of people who use BBC News Online on more than one digital device, you’re likely to start noticing some changes in the next few weeks and months.

In particular, the minority of users who still use the mobile web browser version of our product will see it change, and I’ll explain how that is part of a wider “under the bonnet” project which will ultimately benefit the News Online product as a whole, on all screens.

Kate Milner from my team has written about these changes, while my editorial colleague Steve Herrmann has also blogged.

We believe this is one of the most innovative and largest scale uses of a new approach to creating web applications - called responsive design - that the web has seen, which will ultimately enable us to deliver a better BBC News experience, tailored according to how and where you are using it but which is also familiar and consistent.

So my aim here is to introduce the reasons behind what we're doing.

Complexity

As I say, I still use our mobile site. I really do still prefer to simply scroll up and down than the pinching and zooming required to use the main BBC News website optimised for the PC. However, I am in a minority. More of our smartphone users now choose the "full fat" recipe of the original BBC News website.

I also use our mobile app, as millions do, especially on my tablet. This serves a different need - to quickly get latest headlines - while the website offers greater breadth, depth and explanation of the news.

At that point I want to stop and make an observation. Isn't this all rather complicated? I really don't believe using our product should involve such a range of complex options and questions:

• Which device and software?
• Screen size?
• Portrait or landscape?
• App or "browser"?
• 3G or wifi?
• In the UK or elsewhere?

My brain hurts! I love the convenience of the mobile web as much as anyone, but part of me is looking back with fondness to when the internet was more or less the shape of a personal computer screen, and all we had to do every couple of years was widen the website!

Our challenge now is that the internet comes in all shapes and sizes. Social media sites, email, mapping, banking and all those useful things allow us to seamlessly move from our mobiles to our computers and back again. Increasingly we use tablets and the TV for the web too. And we all just expect everything to work.

Simple innovation

One of the solutions to these challenges is responsive design.

Like many ideas, the thinking behind responsive design is brilliantly simple. Basically, you come to our website, we do the hard work and ask your device all those tricky questions, before delivering a page in the best shape and size, with the most "features", that your device can support.

And like all great technologies, it's easier said than done, and we're blessed with a really talented development team who have driven this innovation. The BBC certainly isn't the first to use responsive design, but we do believe we're the first big news site to start to use it for such a large audience, certainly in the UK.

The need is growing rapidly. In an average week, the BBC News mobile websites and apps are visited by around 9.7m users worldwide on mobile and tablet devices. That represents about 26% of the total traffic to BBC News Online.

And, for the BBC, it's not all about the shiny, expensive phones either. In parts of the world, the vast majority of web users don't have a PC or access to the latest fashionable device. For them, the internet is accessed via a small screen and a keypad, but is crucially important to their lives.

This need for universality is another reason why BBC News is enthusiastically developing responsive design solutions. Unlike many competitors, we are not a business that can target only those audiences who can afford a certain kind of smartphone or tablet. We have an obligation to deliver our core product to screens of all kinds of shapes and sizes. BBC Online has a strategy to deliver to four screens, and that is exactly what responsive design offers.

Our roadmap

You're probably now asking what the plan is and when you can expect change? That's probably for another blog post, since we have a lot of work to do yet. However I can say that:

• This new "mobile" site will work for tablets and computers from day one, and will even offer some basic resizing and reshaping. We'd love your feedback if you use it on any device.
• Our plan is to gradually "optimise" and deliver essential features roughly in order of device size and complexity, starting with the smallest and simplest. So the first imminent step is designed for mobile phones but available to all.
• More features will be delivered to offer mobile and tablet users a better experience with all the advantages of the "full fat" site but none of the awkwardness.
• Eventually, the main website will be delivered in this way too but that is still some way off, and it will be a gradual, step-by-step process rather too complex to go into now, but which we will return to in the future.

Chris Russell is Head of Product for BBC News Online

However we think it is significant for a few reasons:

• It is a mechanism to ensure efficient spend against the BBC Online Service Licence. Put simply - making the right products, in the right way.

• Our partners and external suppliers can now more clearly understand where they can engage and with whom.

• Product management is being taken more seriously across the industry and being both adopted and adapted for the different needs of audiences compared with the users of purer software products.

The BBC's Product Lifecycle Management process describes the way in which the Product Lead and Editorial Lead for each product should work together with their team, and their stakeholders inside and outside the BBC, to define and deliver the strategic goals for the product.

The BBC's product management lifecycle

Creating a world class BBC Online depends on teams from diverse backgrounds working together, and this demands clear and consistent terminology, processes, and governance structures across all products in the BBC Online portfolio.

The Product Lifecycle Management provides a framework for collaboration between technical and editorial disciplines.

We have worked hard to ensure that we maximise the efforts of our skilled software engineers, developers, designers and content producers by properly 'shaping' the product to articulate its evolution through a set of important lenses: audience value and performance, feasibility, deliverability, cost, technical and experience design. Whatever the scale of the output - a BBC News guide to breaking news stories or a longer-term deployment of something like BBC iPlayer to a new platform or device - this process ensures we are focussed on giving the audience what we believe they need in the most cost-effective and innovative way.

Last year the BBC Academy told the story of how the media industry is adopting and adapting product development to fit the cultural differences found in creative organisations whose reputation has been built on content and not software.

While some purists insist that a software product has to have a single owner accountable for success or failure, we believe that each product should be equally led by an editorial expert, accountable for the content and its production, alongside someone with more "traditional" product development expertise. The Product Lead and Editorial Lead - united in a Product Direction Group, reporting up to the Online Direction Group - both have shared targets and devolved budgets to deliver.

How the BBC's Online Direction Group and Product Direction Groups work with each other

We also think the process and governance models can be applied to our 'technical products' which provide underlying services to power the products which our audiences immediately recognise - for example BBCiD, which allows users to log in and personalise their experience, or our content management systems.

It's true that the aims and performance targets for these products and services are defined differently, but the process by which we arrive at these is the same. A clearer, consistent process will be in place to make communication, collaboration, planning and integration easier and we will measure our success here by focussing on more efficient sharing of fewer and more robust technology products than we have managed in the past.

It is also important to make the process more transparent to our partners, suppliers and audiences outside the BBC. During recent consultation with the market concerning options for our future external supplier strategy, I presented this lifecycle making the following key points clear:

• Where "build or buy" decisions are made - after the Definition and Discovery review.

• That their proposals and ideas will be considered using this process.

• Who to contact and who makes decisions. We have also shared details of the Product and Editorial Leads on our commissioning website so partners can easily get in touch with the right people.

The suppliers' feedback was positive, although one person did point out that deploying this process was a significant undertaking. I can certainly identify with that! Recent weeks have been busy for product managers and a small Portfolio Planning Group within Future Media, which is responsible for monitoring our delivery performance and helping product teams adapt. We help to create templates and training for product teams, encouraging everyone to learn from our successes and failures, by copying each other where it makes sense!

While there's more to do, and some teams are further ahead than others, we're pleased with the progress we've made so far, and excited by the potential for dramatically improving the way we work, and the results that could be delivered by the Product Lifecycle Management process.

Coming to a BBC Online Product near you...soon!

Chris Russell is Head of Product Management, BBC News and Knowledge