New look programme pages
March 24, 2008 by upyourego
The new look version of the BBC /Programmes site has gone live - this moves the old beta version of the site - a very white affair - into the new BBC design language templates (wide format, big black bar, bold colours) and is now black and orange.
It’s also easier to navigate than before even though the links and options are exactly the same as before - it’s just that they’re in an easier format and more friendly place on the page.
The big change I think I’d like to see made to the site though is a reversal of the navigation flow - at the moment it starts with the episode and you can eventually drill through to the overall show.
If I was building it I’d put the show first - so if you click a letter you get a list of actual show names (just one link per show) and when you go to that you get a list of series and below that a list of episodes.
You could tailor the show page so that you’re shown the most recent episode aired. This would still allow BBC Programmes to serve its primary purpose of creating a permament presence for every BBC show (radio or television) but still allow it to be a great resource for finding out about archive episodes.
That aside - what I like most about the Programmes site is the ability to easily find out ‘extra’ information about a show - like the credits (given that the BBC squeezes them so small you can’t read them anymore) or when it’s on next and where.
It also lets you watch the most recent episode there and then instead of having to go to the iPlayer site and find it. In fact with the navigation changes I mentioned above there would be no need to go through the iPlayer as /programmes would be an easier way of finding what you want to watch.
The layout of the page is pretty simple - you get a box to watch or listen again at the top of the left column (above), information about when it was and will be on directly underneath.
Credit and related information directly underneath that (above) and on the right hand column you’ve got information on where the series belongs, genres, format and in the case of radio shows (not sure why TV shows don’t) related tags.
The tags are pretty useful as they let you find other shows you might also enjoy, unfortunately it isn’t all radio shows that are tagged and the tags aren’t overly useful on the ones that are.
The Now Show is an example of one that IS tagged but unfortunately the tags are the names of the people in the episode, under other circumstances this would be brilliantly useful but as the Now Show is the only show with tags that those people appear in the only thing a click on the tag gives you is other episodes of the Now Show they’re in.
If however it was tagged with (in addition to the names) satire, musicalcomedy and rant for example I’d be about to click on any of those tags and find other shows on radio or tv that fit the same bill and possibly discover something completely new.
In a world of massive amounts of media (I want to say Mass Media but that still means something else) having ways of discovering things you like is essential and this would be a great way of doing that.
Also - if you have tags on EVERY SHOW then it would make building a fully personalised iPlayer or BBC Homepage much easier as I could type in a list of things I like and, possibly through a controlled vocab, I could have a homepage with only the things I like.
The other thing that’s pretty impressive - more so for the iPlayer stuff is the listings - they go back months so you can find things you might of missed and information about them (for example: you’re watching a show on TV and see someone you half recognise and thing - where did I see them before, I think it was a couple of months ago) you can use the calendar to look through for them.
The other thing I’d like to see - although given the cost of moderation I doubt we will - is the ability to have you say on episodes through the programme pages - this could then be syndicated out (or share a db code) with the same page on the network it belongs to.
All in all though a good start - a long way to go but there is enough useful information in there to keep me going for hours.
You can read more about the /programmes site from these blogs:
BBC Internet (Sophie Walpole)
Derivadow
BBC Internet
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Thanks for the kind overview/review, seems like you’re really appreciating our desire to keep things simple. I thought i could probably fill you in with a little more detail on some of your queries.
Navigational Flow: On the genre and format pages you do get lists of episodes as a default but that’s mostly because with how the data’s been assigned up until now. There have been some recent data changes so expect to see these lists flip from episodes to programme brands soon. The A-Z’s do list programme brands but unfortunately they suffer from more data problems which result in duplicate titles pointing to, what we call, ‘orphaned episodes’. This is our top priority for sorting out the data and it should be addressed over the next few months (these things take time as it involves lots of data flow process and not just data cleansing). With respect to the schedules we strongly believe if you’re clicking on a link that represents an individual episode you should go directly to that episode page.
Extra Information: We’re hoping that the credits section will grow to be more comprehensive (as, indeed, things are a little too fast on our TV screens) and if we can get the right identifiers behind the scenes we could introduce navigation via these names (although that requires a lot of work all the way up our data provision chain).
Tags: The tags are currently a trial with Radio 4 producers adding them to their own programmes hence not being available on other shows. We’re not sure how well this is going to scale in terms of self provisioning our 1000 episodes a day so we’re looking at automating against an internal controlled vocabulary. Early days with this work so don’t want to say too much or over promise
Schedules: These are already served from the channel/network url’s but you can expect these to become much more integrated with their sites in terms of look and feel… and once we have all schedules live we’ll also be able link the broadcast information form an episode page to it’s schedule context, allowing the flow to-and-fro.
Have your say: We’d love to enable more conversation and discussion around specific episodes but you’re right that moderation costs will be a challenge (amongst others). It’s low on the /programmes list at the moment but things have been moving at quite a pace round here of recent and the work around ‘users’ is a massive priority with a different BBC project team so hopefully as their work emerges we can start to tie things together. In the meantime we hope that by making the persistent url, by giving people something to point at, something to link to, we’ve at least enabled the off bbc.co.uk conversations (on blogs, messageboards, emails and IM’s) to be knitted more closely to their original source.