BBC News: you win some, you lose some
BBC online may have just saved itself. For iPhone users at least.
Earlier this month, BBC News launched its new offering. While the information architecture of the site didn’t undergo a change, the navigation into that information architecture was turned upside down. Side menus were moved to the top, while the navigational elements within the body of the homepage were unrecognisable. And the site sucks on an iPhone where the previous site was easily navigable. My review of the changes can be found here.
As is often the case with such wholesale changes, people reacted badly. People don’t like change. And when it’s something as beloved as the BBC website—an offering that has generated affinity and affection in keeping with its offline brand—the reaction to the change is all the more vociferous. But usually this reaction calms down as people get used to, nay sometimes begin to prefer, the new offering. (As an aside, I loved the previous redesign in March 2008 from the moment I set my eyes on it.)
With this change, there has been no such calming. Three weeks in, the people who I know and trust still don’t like it. It’s still confusing and unintuitive, and the BBC has ruled out reverting to the previous incarnation.
To address my frustration at the user experience of the site on the iPhone, I downloaded the newly launched BBC News iPhone app. And I have to say, it’s lovely—at least in comparison to the disgrace that is the website. And it also addresses head-on the Adobe issue, its video footage being accessible through the application.
But I’m still annoyed with the website from my laptop. And I can’t see this going away. And so for the time being, the Guardian will be the source of a greater proportion of my online news absorption.
The new BBC News homepage: my take
BBC News launched their new look and feel last week. I immediately loved the previous major re-branding, in March 2008, and here’s the glowing review I gave it.
On first impressions, I disliked last week’s re-branding. So I allowed a week before passing comment, to allow it to grow on me.
It hasn’t. And here’s my review. The review focuses entirely on the News homepage.
First impressions were drawn to its overt redness. It’s way redder than its predecessor, the header that houses the three main navigational tools lacking the subtlety of before. (For reference, the “before” view can be seen in the link to its review above.) And when news breaks, a further red strapline at the top only goes to accentuate this. Maybe over time this will become white noise. But for the time being, it distracts the eye and takes it away from the site’s content. Embedding the navigation in the header is, however, successful in widening the real estate available for content though.
Now to the typography. It comes across as amateurish. The contrast in size between the clickable title of the headline news article and its summary is way too great. And the very size of the title makes its on-hover underline plain ugly. They appear to have moved from a Verdana-esque font to Arial, which may be more web-friendly but only serves to make the content less visible, to me at least.
The main news items are more difficult to absorb. The pictures that previously accompanied the lead three articles gave context, allowing elements of the article’s subject to be inferred without the need to read the entire summary. This sounds lazy—and maybe it is—but it is a symptom of how people absorb information nowadays. I do like the tag showing which articles are “new”, as previously, a new story that was not deemed important enough to make the top three could easily be lost among the lesser stories.
The right-hand column interests me little. Maybe as video becomes yet more prevalent online, I will find myself clicking more over there, but for the time being, that column, above the fold at least, is almost redundant to me. It’s very orange though.
Besides the Sport link in the top navigation, nothing sport-related makes its way above the fold unless a sports story makes mainstream news (e.g. yesterday’s Open result). I think this is a crying shame, particularly given the BBC’s deserved reputation in this field.
Below the fold, I get lost in a heap of yet more confusion. There isn’t sufficient visual distinction between the Also in the News section and Sport. And the lack of any tags against any of the Sport headlines means you have to know your stuff and may result in confusion. Surfaced articles such as Wigan sign Melbourne trio, without the Rugby League tag, will cause confusion.
The grey localisation box (after all, it’s location based rather than being based on anything any more specific about my person) is a half-arsed attempt at personalised news. Down the right, again general confusion is the order of the day until you hit the familiar and loved Most Popular box, which straddles the second fold, on this laptop at least.
The lead stories from the site’s main sections (Business, Politics, Technology etc.) are stacked four abreast, lesser citizens in a homepage stripped of any sense of order. And the iPlayer gets some airtime in the bottom right corner, almost an afterthought.
Look at the site on an iPhone, and as well as being unable to access any of the video content because of the Apple/Adobe stand-off, you’re confronted with a site that is difficult to navigate, with lots of vertical and horizontal scrolling and general difficulty getting close to any of the content.
Overall, the homepage is a mess. It lacks structure, order and any meaningful visual differentiation. And I miss its predecessor dearly.
Huddle’s confusing nomenclature
In SharePoint, if you want to edit a file, you check it out. And when you’re done, you check it back in. It makes sense. It works.
In Huddle, if you want to edit a file, you lock it. And when you’re done, you unlock it. I find this far more confusing.
I understand the rationale for Huddle’s choice in nomenclature. In locking a file, you are preventing other people from editing it. And when you unlock it, those with permissions are again entitled to edit it.
But it would make equal sense to me if the terms were reversed. I might unlock a file to edit it—just as I would unlock a bike to ride it—and then lock it when I’m done.
The terms they’ve chosen result in a slightly confusing user experience.
Free and ad-free: it’s unsustainable. Get over yourselves
I happened upon a tweet from @gazbeirne recently that read:
Has the person who decided to start putting adverts over the bottom half of youtube videos been found and shot yet?
I suspect the answer is no. And rightly so. For too long, the general public has been getting internet stuff for free, ignorant of the cost of providing the service and hell-bent not to pay anything towards it.
People are up in arms at The Times’ proposal to start charging for its content. But if that is what they must do to sustain their service, then so be it. Whether it’s the right commercial model—if there is such a concept of right or wrong in this space—remains to be seen. But you have to respect them for trying.
And the same goes for Google, despite my belief, one growing among my peers, that Google’s Do No Evil mantra is poppycock. Providing YouTube content to people is not free, irrespective of whether the content was a rights-free video shot by your mate. There is technology and people to pay for to allow that content to be served to the public.
Now if you asked the average YouTube visitor to pay for content à la Times, then they’d most certainly say no. (Actually, they’d most likely grunt judging by the state of the comments they leave on videos.) But ask them to pay for it indirectly through the medium of advertising and you have yourself an angry Gaz Beirne.
The free, ad-free world is unsustainable. Get over it. And along the way, get over yourselves.
Coming to my senses, but only the ones I choose
This afternoon, news was breaking. Big news. Gordon Brown had allegedly signalled his upcoming resignation as Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party.
I was on the move. I had left my client’s offices and was ready to a board a London-bound train. I had an intermittent 3G signal.
My main source of news was Twitter, which was flooded with tweets on the very subject, as you might imagine. I looked for more official news reporting by going to the iPhone TVCatchup web offering to stream BBC News.
I was looking for something more dynamic than textual news, but my bandwidth was insufficient for TV streaming to be any better than frustrating, tiny snippets interrupted by lengthy pauses, often broken entirely as the 3G connection disappeared as we wended our way through Essex stations.
I was after audio. I wanted to hear the reporting and discussion that was taking place on BBC News without my connection grinding to a halt as a result of fat video content.
I’ve often thought that there are certain circumstances in which it would be great if such audio streams were available. Soap fans could listen to EastEnders in the car on the way home from work. And I could have had a rewarding experience listening to the news. Maybe that’s what radio is for, but the technologists seem to have been better at making video content available than audio content.
I’d like to be able to choose a channel and choose which senses to satisfy. Is that too much to ask?
Cheques are the new online banking
I was due to pay my company’s corporation tax before the end of March. (HMRC choose to capitalise—in the non-financial sense of the word—the C and T. I don’t like paying it, so give it no such respect.) Anyway, suffice to say it’s a substantial sum, five figures in size.
I had my HMRC ID, and added the payee through my internet banking interface. This was no mean feat, as the ridiculous number of facets of HMRC are so difficult to navigate. (My VAT payee is “CUSTOMS AND EXCISE”, FFS.) Anyway, I managed to find the appropriate payee for my corporation tax, and was ready to give them my company’s money, physically at least, even if emotionally I was far from being there.
I informed the interface that I wanted to transfer some money to HMRC, and it asked how much. I then got an error, saying that it could not process single payments in excess of £10,000.
I called my business banking manager in an attempt to make the payment over the phone. She informed me that they could not process single payments in excess of £10,000. The consistency was beautiful, but the consistent message itself was shit.
The business banking manager told me that I could make the payment in a branch. So I popped in. And indeed I could. The only way to transfer more than £10,000 in a single day to HMRC (or indeed any other organisation) was via a BACS payment. Cost to me: £30. Now I like paying tax as much as the next man, but I will not pay for the privilege of giving HMRC swathes of cash.
So I wrote a cheque, popped it in the post and a few days later, my account balance got the shit kicked out of it through the cashing of that one cheque.
The cost borne by HMRC in processing that payment was doubtless much greater than it would have been had I paid it electronically. But the cost differential for me was too great for me to choose the electronic medium.
After April 2011, HMRC will not accept cheque payments. My bank has not heard of this issue before (bullshit) and is investigating how it might address it. I am not holding my breath. Next year, I might just walk into 100 Parliament Street with some brown envelopes.
Big isn’t always good
I’m fed up. Specifically, I’m fed up of large organisations, organisations that have lost the concept of accountability. Allow me to explain.
All too often, I will call a company to express my disappointment and displeasure at the service they’re offering, only to be reduced to a heap, rocking backwards and forwards in the corner of my living room, defeated by the interminable bureaucracy.
Below are some recent examples:
British Gas
I have an insurance contract with them (HomeCare) that covers my electrics, drainage, boiler and central heating. I pay a handsome sum for the privilege. I called on a Friday reporting blocked drains. They deemed it a non-emergency so refused a weekend callout, but promised me an 8–10am slot on Monday morning.
No one arrived. At 10.02am, I called asking their whereabouts. I was told that no such slot should have been promised, but that someone would be with me before 6pm, and they would call giving one hour’s notice. At 4.54pm, I called again asking their whereabouts, only to be told that they weren’t coming today.
I arranged for the problem to be sorted privately, and am awaiting their response on reimbursement of the invoice.
Lambeth Council
Last week, I arranged a bulk rubbish collection, of which I’m allowed four per year. The guy arrived today and took away a rug and a bedside table, but couldn’t be arsed with the large carpet. The operator couldn’t do anything about this because the ticket was still “live”.
A man with a van is coming tomorrow morning to take the carpet, costing me £50.
Virgin Media
In October, I signed up to an all-inclusive Virgin Media package for a monthly amount quoted to me over the phone. After the service (including new set-top boxes) was installed, they started billing me 20% more than that agreed monthly amount. On questioning, they apologised for quoting the wrong figure and told me that the correct figure was the higher amount.
I am still working out how this might be resolved.
Many of the people I speak to in these organisations are, in themselves, lovely. They are polite, courteous and seem to want to help. But the bureaucracy that surrounds them, through no fault of their own, prevents them from doing so.
You see, no single person is empowered. Each department exists in isolation, calls passing between them but with no one having a holistic view of the customer experience, nor the power to manage that. And often, as was the case today with Lambeth, the operators blame the process for their inability to resolve the issue.
Smaller companies carry more accountability, don’t blame their colleagues or sister departments and generally give a shit about the customer. The above companies, as organisations in themselves, do not. Even if some of the people therein do.
Haiti: the need for a trusted charity donations app.
I need not echo the words that so many have already voiced with regard to the sympathy and the need to help Haiti. Perhaps no one has voiced them more clearly than Jay Smooth here.
Soon after the devastating earthquake, there were requests for help, particularly for donations. 90999 was widely publicised on Twitter as a number to text, costing $10 plus the cost of the text. And more recently, 70077 has been publicised similarly, allegedly aligned to the Disasters Emergency Committee, texts costing £5. (I have not previously heard of this committee.)
I would like to donate. But I have no way of understanding the authenticity of the organisations behind these text numbers. And so I’m nervous about donating through them, both because they may screw me for way more money than I thought, and because I have no way of knowing whether the money will indeed go towards the disaster to which I think I’m donating.
Yet my phone is such a well-suited device from which to contribute. It is convenient and it already has a direct debit (to O2, or to Apple) to support any contributions made.
There is a desperate need for an iPhone application released by a trusted body (possibly a charity, possibly the government, possibly Apple, even) within which users can donate to charities that subscribe, charities that are vetted by the trusted body with an independently-written description.
The application would be simple. Click, choose or search for your charity of choice and enter a donation amount. When prompted, enter your iTunes password (if this is indeed the authentication method of choice) after which you’re presented with a confirmation screen. Close the application and then go about your business.
I would happily pay an extra £1 on top of every donation I make to fund the trusted body in its management of the charities on the application. And I’m sure charities would happily pay a subscription to feature in the app.
Does it have legs?
Skype: a review
I took a while to adopt Skype. But now that I have the business need to use it, I love it, partly because of the business need, but mostly because the product has evolved.
I wasn’t happy when Skype tied me to my PC. That’s not how people make/take or want to make/take calls. They want to make calls with the freedom with which mobile technology has provided them. And even if I’m sitting on my sofa talking to someone, I don’t want the hassle of an accompanying laptop or the inability to move around if I so choose.
I dabbled with Skype when we lived in the US, but audio only, and the above constraints meant that it was a less-than-pleasing experience.
But now: I love Skype. I use it for both personal and work purposes, and I would be annoyed if it was taken from me. I started using it again when I downloaded the Skype iPhone app. It only works over wireless, and I started using it to call the US of an evening—during the US working day—while within the range of my home wireless network. It allows me to call people directly from my iPhone contact list, and although not integrated into the phone functionality of the iPhone, it works just as well from the app.
I was recently sent an email confirming my Skype to Go number. This is an outer-London number (based on the STD code) that I can dial from my mobile phone (now in my contacts), after which it invites me to enter the number I want to dial, complete with country code (“followed by the pound, or hash key”). This new-found freedom means I can dial whoever I want from wherever I want (normal mobile reception allowing) for Skype rates.
To use this carefree, I use their auto-top-up feature which, similar to Oyster, tops my account up with a fixed amount whenever it falls below £5 of credit, emailing me a receipt in the process. Beautiful. Earlier today, I called a hotel in Luxembourg without even thinking about how much the call was costing me. (I just looked it up: 1.2p per minute plus the cost of my London call (which was included in my “free” mobile minutes anyway.))
The only pain with the Skype to Go approach is that I have to write down or remember the number I want to call before calling Skype to Go. But even this obstacle can be overcome through the ability to add speed-dial numbers to my Skype to Go number.
And finally, here’s the icing on the cake. I tried calling my Skype to Go number from a landline today, to see whether it instead routed the call to my mobile. It doesn’t. But it did ask me to authenticate myself, after which I was able to make whatever calls I wanted. From the landline. Using my Skype credit.
All in all, I’m a convert. I love it.
I’d like it if their next step was to enable cheap calls from your mobile to international numbers when abroad. And there should be a way, in my opinion, of using my Wii’s internet connection to use Skype. Now that would be fun. Just sit on the sofa and you can talk to whomever you choose, and their voice comes out of the TV. FTW.
Sharing needs de-duplication and context
There are a number of media out there at the moment that invite you to give some form of acceptance of a piece of content. Google Reader allows you to star, like, share or email a post, or indeed send it to Facebook or Twitter. And Twitter allows you to retweet stuff. Add to this people’s ability to feed certain things (such as their Google Reader shared items) to other media (e.g. Twitter) and it adds up to quite a bit of confusion, and often lots of duplication.
I have a friend, for example, who is a “friend” on Google, who I follow on Twitter and who subscribes to some of the same websites as I do on Google Reader. In some instances, I’ll be directed to a single post three times: on his Twitter feed, in my “People you follow” area of Google Reader, and through my own subscription to that site on Google Reader. Other friends push their Twitter feed to Facebook and even have a weekly Twitter wrap-up, again resulting in the same content being “appreciated” three times. Not good.
It would be useful if there was some way of suppressing content that I’ve already seen through another medium, but I suspect given the tactical ways in which this functionality has evolved, and the competition between the various medium owners, this is unlikely.
Also, Google Reader kindly tells me how many other people like the post, almost trying to give it some level of acceptance with which to cloud my own judgment. I happen to like this, but the number in isolation is somewhat meaningless. Twenty people liking one of my posts would be an unequivocal success (hell, one would be nice!); while twenty people liking an xkcd post would indicate low levels of appeal. It would be much better to give this a more contextual score based on the number of subscribers. Or better still, based on the number of subscribers that have thus far accessed it. So if I have ten subscribers and get three “likes”, then this would be given the same score as 11,893 of xkcd’s 35,678 subscribers liking one of its posts. And the post’s popularity score might be further weighted by the pull of my various followers. So Seth Godin liking one of my posts would carry more weight than my liking one of his.
Just a thought.