BBC Drop

BBC news in swipeable, byte-sized pieces for the smartphone generation. Our team at Ongair built it for a BBC hackathon and won.

Team: Ongair
Role: UX, UI and front end
When: 2015
Outcome: Won a BBC hackathon

Three phones on a pink and purple gradient: How it works, with swipe right for more stories and swipe up to read; Make Drop your own, with categories including Sport, Politics and Culture; and a story, “the DROP on ISIS”, with 251k likes.

The problem

Young people weren’t getting their news from the BBC’s radio, TV, apps or website. The brief was to build something that curates current, credible, byte-sized news, and generates business leads.

The mission

Current, byte-sized news in a colourful design that’s easy to use. You swipe away anything you don’t want to read, which makes it an easy way into BBC news for the smartphone generation.

The goal

The stakeholders had a very clear goal. Get people to use BBC apps for news, especially young people who spend a lot of time online on their phones.

What I did

Stakeholder interviews
User interviews
Establishing key audiences
Personas
Scenarios
Site maps
Competitive research
Low-fidelity prototypes
Wireframes
High-fidelity design and guidelines
Hand coding in HTML5 and CSS3
Usability testing with focus groups

Drop in a phone browser: a sports story about Andy Murray beating John Isner at the Shanghai Masters, with Like on the left and “Swipe up to share this story with your friends” below.

Results

101 people rated it on the taster website.
Steady traffic growth since launch.
A low bounce rate, and mid to high average time on site.
Mobile first, for an African audience.
People shared stories on social media, which we took as a sign they trusted the content.
In-page analytics and click tracking showed people could find their way around.