New BBC homepage coming for smartphones, tablets and TVs too

To roll out in coming months

If you thought that the BBC's new homepage looked like it'd be a perfect fit for a smartphone or a tablet, then you'd be right. The homepage was built with Auntie's "1 service, 10 products, 4 screens" policy in mind - and a smartphone, tablet and even, possibly, a TV version will be coming soon.

"It shares a design principle that we've seen in tablets and mobile phones and we've heard from reviewers during testing over the last couple of months that it feels quite natural to them because of that," said James Thornett, product manager for BBC Homepage.

"We are already looking in advance, and thinking about how this would appear on a mobile platform. With the user interaction and design, you can see how tablets could easily be adapted and we are also talking with our colleagues across the business of TV. There are interesting discussions around the converging of TV platforms in the future as well."

Thornett also explained how the redesign of the homepage is part of a wider initiative, and is a configuration that will be eventually spread across the wealth of the BBC's online platforms.

"Visually and in terms of the technology used, this is the biggest change that we've made," he explained. "We built it from the ground up and we believe it to be an intuitive, time and location based experience for users.

"When we set up the strategy in January, we set up a very clear user experience vision to run alongside our technical product delivery and you're starting to see some of that bare fruit now.

"I would expect you to see, within the course of the next few weeks, months and years, the rollout of the design front and this kind of interaction and style across all of our sites."

Thornett explained that a blanket redesign of all of the BBC's sites in one go was an impossibility, not just down to the size of the task, but because there would be a risk of alienating the huge readership.

Tags: Online BBC Online BBC Tablets Phones TV apps

New BBC homepage coming for smartphones, tablets and TVs too originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:37:00 +0100

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