BBC Sport Live Comments Uploader

Context

The BBC Sport Live pages constantly update with the latest content relating to the hot topic of the hour within sports. However, in order for a public user to add comments and reactions to the live feed, it doesn’t work in similar ways to social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Comments are hand picked by a member of the sport editorial team.  User has to send off comments from their personal email account. It was a frustrating journey and put people off from engaging in the first place due to the friction there. A solutions had to be explored in order reduce this friction and improve user participation on the BBC Sport LIVE platform.

My role was the following:

• Speaking to editorial team to understanding their current process and how the new solution can work around them
• User interaction and prototyping different variations of the solution.
• Assisting in the usability testing for variations of the content uploader.

Important activities

• Look at competitors
• Explore different variations of the uploader
• Prioritise any additional features – what are ‘nice to haves’? Confirm this with stakeholders
• Deciding on error states
• Agree colour palette to be used in BBC Sport and possibly BBC News
• What data do we need to collect from the user? Do we need to include an email address?
• Confirm required inclusions for privacy policy, etc
• Consideration of interactive states:
  • Disabled/closed state
  • Loading/submitting state
  • Upload failure state
• How does page updating work? i.e.When editorial change the solicit mid-event, will the Live page update automatically to show the new question?
• What happens if the user is in the middle of typing a response to the previous question?
• Do we need any changes to the scrolling behaviour? (Between steps or after on form validation.)
• Are there character limits on the questions?
• Bespoke functionality guidelines
• Agree measures of success