How do we Engage the Youth of Today?

BBC Micro was created to counter the fact that youth in modern day UK are not getting their daily news updates from the BBC. Spanning multiple channels, BBC recognize this problem and that youth were not engaged by their content, or rather they were getting their daily news sources from other media. In other words BBC was creating News that was not easily accessible to them.

BBC Micro makes news available to youths. It allows customizability of news organized into bite sized pieces. It lets users choose what they want and what is interesting for them to be incorporated into the on-the-go lifestyle and their daily loops.

My Role

Myself and 6 other people entered this competition hosted by D&AD with this project. Being later to enter we only had 3 weeks to refine this idea and submit. This idea was awarded top 10 out of hundreds of entries. I worked as a UX designer, graphic designer, strategic analyst and strategic interactions designer on this project.

Why and How?

BBC Micro redefines how your daily news is delivered, this mobile application provides a new way to connect with the content on BBC's multiple platforms. You receive customized, bite-sized content twice a day through interactive notifications.

It customizes the type of content and summarizing articles into short reads reducing the cognitive overload, and specifically works into youth usage patterns related to media consumption

Insights

Insights BBC Micro looks targets specifically the ‘board in line network’, as they are the primary smartphone users, as they wait in line, updating their Facebook status and reading their tweets.

This audience prefers consuming snackable content, shorten form data that is quick and easy to engage with. This audience group is most often updates themselves on news items early in the morning and late at night right before the going to be, also what psychologist name, the ‘loop’.

Within our first iteration, we looked at creating a notification that is active and attractive. The application shows the daily cycle of news items as interactable notifications, ready for consumptions set twice a gain, dependent on each user's.

It was also important for use to create a sense of engagement for the youths that will use BBC Micro. Commenting acts as a way for them to be heard and and engaged as an audience. through BBC does not necessarily wish to interact with their audience, this allows the to create the illusion of interaction without really interacting.

After our submission, the team furthered our original design, with more focus on the F-shaped patterns of reading content on applications. We took inspiration from Big Ben, looking at the layers of the clock and its bells applying this layered process onto our designs.

We applied a useful onboarding mechanism for users to familiarize themselves with the custimizabilities of this application, as well as managed the notifications for even further quick reading to allow for speedy browsing. Users are able to quickly travel from one article to another via swiping left and right. Easy tags are also available for users to easily search for selected topics.

We further provided a interactive marker for both easy follow-through reading, which when pulled out allows for fast access to sharing options.