I’ve got to say that I’m somewhat disappointed by the current state of play of some of the BBC’s websites. In particular, their main BBC1 and BBC2 homepages, and the BBC Radio homepage.
Let’s start with a specific example.
BBC2 has a new series called Are We There Yet presented by ex-Panorama reporter John Ware. It started last week, and seems to be an effort to salve the BBC’s conscience for also carrying Top Gear. Of course, Top Gear goes out on Sunday nights, while Are We There Yet is in the “dead” slot opposite Eastenders.
I wanted to go and visit the website. But I didn’t know the URL. Naturally I alight at www.bbc.co.uk. I invariably click the TV icon at the top to take me to www.bbc.co.uk/tv.
There I have lots of funky overlays that change the secondary content of the page – the main content is fixed (today, it’s Life on Mars). Selecting BBC2 presents me with three programmes – none of which is Are We There Yet – and a “What’s On BBC2” option which simply takes me to a listings page. That’s no use to me, so I click on the BBC2 logo and thankfully, if less than intuitively, end up at the BBC2 homepage.
The look of the page is very “clean.” By that I mean that there’s hardly any content on the page. There’s a big display at the top promoting one particular thing – yesterday it was a competition to make your own BBC2 ident which while I personally might be interested in it, is not the best thing to lead on. Most people just want to know about the programmes!
Today it’s clips of various programmes playing and strong links to Dragons’ Den and The Graham Norton Show. The right hand column has “Stuff From You” which seems to be snippets of nice things people have said about BBC2 shows on other websites. I wonder if this blog entry will be featured?
Then down the left we have three big options:
Home – that’s where I am already
Everything – ??????????
TV Listings – what it says on the tin
There are also some generic links.
So where do I go to find out about Are We There Yet? I click Everything. There are some links to some comedy pages for relevant programmes, links to the new BBC2 idents (not really the most important aspect of the channel even if everyone concerned is very chuffed with them). Then there are some links to other shows, including the aforementioned Top Gear even though it’s no longer on air. No sign of Are We There Yet. Then some links to YouTube highlighting clips available there. Quite why the BBC can’t host them isn’t entirely clear to me, but there you go. Finally “More Speed” which seems to simply be links to Top Gear clips.
I next try TV Listings. The show’s on tonight, and I see a neatly presented list of BBC2’s schedule today. There at 7.30pm is the programme. I click the link and get taken to a version of the same page with a short summary of what the programme’s about, followed by the listings again. All nicely done, but no link to the programme’s website.
Maybe it simply doesn’t have a website. It’s possible. Not every programme gets the resource for something like that.
I click the A-Z Index that appears at the top of every page on the BBC site, and choose A:
Are You Being Served?
Are You Younger than You Think?
No sign of Are We There Yet.
So finally I try the search box – and it works! The first link, described as the Best Link, takes me to the page for the programme.
It’s good to know that a site exists, and you can get to it. But it really shouldn’t be that hard. You should be able to find information by simply clicking through.
In actual fact, I missed the first programme in the series and I didn’t know exactly what it was called. How would I then search for it? I should be able to get to it via a logical process. There’s simply no excuse for not having links from the TV listings.
The BBC2 site looks “clean” but for clean read “has minimal links and information”. I realise that people don’t necessarily want to see gargantuan lists of programmes, but there are smart design ways of presenting lots of information in easy to consumer manners. Many newspaper sites are very good at it. Indeed the BBC’s own News site is also pretty good.
Incidentally, the Are We There Yet site actually falls within the News section of bbc.co.uk. There’s not a lack of joined up thinking because BBC Two is a different department to BBC News is there? There’s no direct link to Newsnight from the “Everything” page of BBC2 either.
While I’m on a rant, here’s another example. The Trap, the new Adam Curtis series, started on Sunday night on BBC2. The impact The Power of Nightmares (not a “real” site) and previous Curtis documentaries had means that there’s a lot of interest in this programme. Hurrah – there is a direct link from the “Everything” page. But the page is terrible. It plays a short extract of the series and here is the entire rest of the content from this “microsite”:
This series of three films, Bafta-winning producer Adam Curtis (Power of Nightmares) examines the notion of freedom. He demonstrates how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures has led to today’s idea of freedom. Examining the government, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and terrorist attacks in Britain, Curtis shows how we’re in a trap of our own making. A trap that controls us and causes chaos abroad.
That’s it. Nothing else. Nada.
Hang on. There’s a link that says “More information about The Trap.”
I click on it and I’m taken…. to the BBC Press Information site! Now this is a useful site, but should the average viewer have to be negotiating around a site designed for journalists and filled with press releases and press packs? You have to scroll down past pieces on Castaway and Comic Relief before you get to The Trap. And the piece we get is only moderately longer than the piece quoted above.
What’s the point? Other links from The Trap’s “main” page include one to Curtis’ entry on Wikipedia. Wouldn’t a transcript be useful? A Q&A with Adam Curtis? Even the same content that’s over on the press office site just presented a little more fully with pictures on the consumer site?
Rubbish.
Finally a brief bit about the new BBC Radio homepage. Again, it’s the new clean look that they’ve gone for with rollovers for each station. But the layout means you do need to be a dab hand with your mouse, and it’s a shame that only one station’s programmes can be displayed at a time. Are we all so insular and stuck in our ways that we might only listen to one service? Where’s the opportunity for a Radio 4 listener who might make a beeline for that button to be “upsold” a Radio 3 play? Or a Radio 2 comedy?
The icons at the bottom explaining ways to listen are very good, but given that displays are getting every larger, it seems strange that the radio site should use so little screen “real estate”.
I really hope that the Beeb doesn’t follow through in too similar a style with the stations’ individual sites. Currently a design expert might call the Radio 4 website messy. There is a lot of text on it, but I want to see a full range of programmes. I don’t want style over substance.