First impressions of the beta BBC home page
The latest revision of the BBC home page is certainly more evolution than revolution, but has some interesting alterations along the way.
The latest revision of the BBC home page is certainly more a gentle evolution than revolution, but has some interesting alterations along the way.
Looking at the site from an information architecture perspective, the first thing that struck me was the shift of Search from centre to the highly conventional top right of the page. If you saw Henny Swan’s piece, Where’s my Googlebox – adventures in search for silver surfers which I previously highlighted in my Favourite things from December ’09, you’ll have read Henny make the following observation:
‘All participants had a hard time distinguishing between the search field in the web page (positioned top-centre just below the browser address box), the browser address box and the browser search box. When asked to look up www.tesco.com most would write the URL in the BBC search field and hit search.’
This makes sense to me and has always felt a little awkward – something that looks great in concept, less so amidst browser chrome and a variety of input areas seeking your attention.
Secondly, a primary navigation has re-appeared. The BBC in its release notes for the new beta home page describes this as:
‘easier and faster access to the most popular sites across the BBC’
Of course, these very same links have been sat in their respective modules on this page and continue to do so. The BBC doesn’t explain its rationale for the home page alone, though it’s clear it is a first step in creating a persistent navigation across all BBC sites, but you have to assume that relying on section links within content modules wasn’t working particularly well. Again, this doesn’t feel like a surprise – that inability to ‘see’ across the available sections in a single view weakened the effectiveness of the home page as a route to key sections.
Interesting, largely common-sense changes and far from the last changes we’ll see from the BBC over the coming months.
Postscript: Since this post, the BBC has written a thorough breakdown of the recent changes to the home page: