TITLE: “Developing a global experience language for the BBC’s digital services”
WHEN: Monday, February 28th, 14h00
WHERE: M203 (the function room next to Murrays restaurant, where the HSF meetings take place), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton
I’m really happy to announce that our first speaker of the year will be Bronwyn van der Merwe, the BBC’s head of design and user experience. Bronwyn’s background is in web development and design. She has worked at the BBC for over 10 years, where she has led a number of award-winning projects.
In February 2010, she wrote an in-depth, fascinating blog post about the BBC website redesign project, and the development of a “global visual language”, the aim of which is to unify the BBC style across all its facets. I reviewed it at the time, and now I am very glad to welcome her to EBI Interfaces, to tell us more about the process she and her team went through; the decisions; the strategies, and of course more about this unifying global language.
TALK BACKGROUND
The BBC website began its official life back in December 1997. It was a basic offering with two sections to the site. Over time it has grown to encompass a great deal more, however due to the organic way in which the website evolved and the old structure of the business, with dozens of small design teams working independently from each other,the site had a fairly schizophrenic nature once you delved into itsdepths.
About three years ago, after printing out the site onto what has now become known as the ‘Wall of Shame’, we decided to embark on an ambitious project to develop a “Global Experience Language” for theBBC’s digital services with the aim of unifying the visual and interaction design of bbc.co.uk, our mobile site, and our interactiveTV offerings.
Brilliant talk, thank you so much Francis for hosting this for us all. Thank you Bronwyn and Andy for bringing us inspiration, and hope!