What improvements has the new homepage brought us?

BBC Gateway homepage - 10 May 2011

There were a number of business reasons why we decided to redesign the BBC’s intranet homepage and start work on sorting out the rest of the intranet;

• Increase efficiency
• Promote simplicity
• Encourage collaboration
• Make it easier to do stuff

and move on from the previous homepage that had been knocking around in a couple of incarnations for the past six or so years.

Our strategy focussed on five broad areas;

• Pan-BBC governance
• Editorial leadership
• Technical development
• Content production
• Systems and tools

And we’ve not only redesigned the homepage, we’ve started work on the top level landing pages, and soon we’ll start on the rest, including on-line applications.

This is a big gig and shouldn’t be underestimated as to it’s complexity. Not easy, but is anything that’s worth doing ?

A couple of weeks later….

Since we launched our new homepage design, feedback has been flooding in. As you can imagine, it’s wide and varied, but a couple of major themes have emerged.

1. People generally like the new uncluttered design with it’s simplistic style.
2. Users want the opportunity to add their own links. This is something our testing didn’t throw up (or we didn’t appreciate the amount of people who had added their own links to the previous site) so we’ve now introduced new functionality that allows users to add their own links, whilst maintaining the list of popular default links that can also be used.
3. There are a bunch of errors that need to be fixed.

Our next steps include;

1. Creation of templates, used with the content management system to allow publishers to make use of a consistent approach and design and concentrate on the content, not site development. These will be inline with the BBC’s internet.
2. Fix the errors.
3. Research how people use the search engine and make improvements accordingly.
4. Look to see what additional functionality we can introduce using Sharepoint 2007.