BBC Homepage Beta – Jumping on the Web 2.0 band wagon
22 Jan 2008 by Andrew Banks in Websites
The new BBC home page is undergoing some changes and the BBC is after your feedback.
Previously the BBC has launched some excellent versions of their website and BBC.co.uk has been one of the most innovative websites in recent years.
For example, the Glasswall version was outstanding.
However, this time around I think they’ve got a long way to go before this Beta version should be released into live.
So what are the issues?
Ultimately I believe this beta version is suffering from “Web 2.0 Syndrome”, with web 2.0 design being an obvious inspiration for the graphical treatment of the homepage. There is also an abundance of Web2.0 features and technology in use on the site – such as AJAX and user generated/specified content.
A lot of the new features will be really useful and are in tune with the BBC’s ways of innovating on BBC.co.uk - such as specifying your own homepage content, mini widgets for TV and weather panels. These are great ways of using Web 2.0 functionality to allow large amounts of content to be displayed in small screen areas and the way the BBC has implemented them means that the whole page appears to be very responsive and tactile – a great positive for the customer experience.
On the flip side of this the graphical treatment of the page makes it feel like a “BBC for Dummies” website. Al the buttons and panels look like they belong on a touch screen interface as they are big enough for even the fattest of fingers to hit.
From a usability stance I don’t agree with the way colour coding has been used. Typical websites may use colour coding to define sections of a website, for example sport may have a blue nav bar and entertainment may have a red nav bar. What the BBC have done on their site is to provide coloured tabs under the main header image to flip in and out of various features. If these coloured tabs were representative of the section they took you too I would be happy, but what the BBC implemented is a full colour change of the whole page dependent on which main feature you view. It feels almost like a developer said “Hey, look what I can do, and doesn’t it look cool….” and that usability was completely discarded.
My final rant for the day is this…
Why the hell do we need a clock sitting in the top right of the BBC home page? It reminds me of 1999 when websites had JavaScript clocks that followed your mouse around the page. It’s not big ad it’s not clever.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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On February 27th 2008 at 11:41 am, Dear BBC - I am not blind said :
[...] live with the new BBC homepage and I really don’t see why it needed to change. As I’ve blogged about previously, the BBC have often lead the way with their homepage but this time I think they’ve hit rock [...]