As product manager for the Homepage I was really looking forward to this and couldn't wait to hear the ideas which were going to be pitched to us.

The Creative Studio Workshop Day

Over six months have now passed since the initial creative studio day and the pilots are now well underway. One of these pilots is called Now by creative software team Red Badger.

As the champion for the Now project I thought I would share my experience so far.

As the name suggests we want to create a time based Homepage to give a real feeling of liveliness.

By offering different levels of manual and automatic personalisation the user gets live information on things that they are most interesting in, be it Strictly or F1.

This 'fast lane' of content, which is relevant to you, sits on the right hand side of the page and updates dynamically.

I also felt the potential to integrate social media and tie-in to big events such as Radio 1's Big Weekend, Children In Need or Wimbledon was really exciting.

Getting started

We initially took a small step back and did a little bit more discovery work to validate the ideas before jumping into the build.

This started with a great workshop day at Red Badgers studio.

Myself and colleagues from UX and Editorial spent the afternoon reviewing the work so far, looking at our audience personas, reviewing competitors, market trends and also sharing what we thought were the most important elements of the concept.

It was really important to me to get something in front of the audience as quickly as possible to gauge what they thought of the idea so a prototype was swiftly put together and we agreed to spend a day showing it to our audience the following week.

User testing

Last week we completed a day of user testing in the R&D lab at Media City in Salford. We spent a whole day speaking to representatives from various audience demographics and ages.

We showed them our idea, listened to what they thought about it and observed how they would use it.

The main concept was positively received by all participants. Some of the key things we learnt were:

• Filtering content by topics was popular.
• There was an expectation to remove content and topics if they aren't of interest.
• General impression was that the page is more up to date.
• People weren't comfortable with seeing social media content from their friends alongside BBC published content.
• Keep it simple - people would generally prefer larger images and slightly less functionality. For example the full set of share tools on every item isn't necessary.

We are now using this insight to help form the final idea and help us prioritise what features will make it into the backlog.

Work in progress on the Now pilot

What the audience said

"You could just have it on your laptop or whatever, [...] you could have it minimised, and it's there and just refreshes it, and keeps it up-to-date."

"That's a BBC reporter. It was seven minutes ago so you don't get more up to date than that"

"These are up to date things that [the BBC] have posted about the show. That [post] was only 30 seconds ago that's brilliant'

"Definitely [I'd come back throughout the day] because that's going to guide me to the interesting bits of news and save me time looking for it."

"Not really [interested in seeing what his friends shared], only because I go on to BBC for professional journalism and BBC opinion on views and journalistic approach. I don't go on there for other people's opinions really."

The prototype

As this is a pilot we have got the opportunity to use a range of technology which means we can build as much as possible in the time we have, which is just four weeks.

We are currently prioritising the features we feel offer the most value to the audience and are at the heart of the concept.

The biggest challenge with this project is how we make it relevant to people. The BBC publish so much content every day how do we decide what is important and relevant enough to appear in the fast lane?

We are hoping by using a combination of linked data and filters we can solve this problem.

What next?

The current plan is the pilots will be live to the public on the Connected Studio site where possible so I will be able to put links to them for everyone to access.

We are also planning on running user testing sessions with 100 members of the audience so we can gather feedback before making a decision on whether to implement it into bbc.co.uk.

Eleni Sharp is Product Manager, BBC Homepage, News & Knowledge, BBC Future Media.

Changes to the BBC Homepage highlighted - a new flavour bar and a simplified carousel

Hello, I'm Eleni Sharp, Product Manager of the BBC Homepage.

I'm delighted to tell you about a development on the Homepage which the team and I have been working on and which went live yesterday.

We have been developing the following new features to the carousel which takes up the top half of the page. The changes are based on how we can see the audience have been using the page and also what people have told us about the page during audience feedback sessions.

From today the Homepage has changed in the following ways:

• There's a revised content mix in the carousel

• There's a new flavour bar in the middle of the page

• News and Sport are no longer grouped together

• Carousel rotations are no longer dependant on interaction with the flavour bar, hopefully making it easier for people to see more content

Why make these changes?

The role of the Homepage is an important one. It is often a visitor's first impression of BBC Online and the start of their journey with the BBC. The Homepage's purpose is to ensure people can find what they are looking for as quickly as possible and also encourage them to browse to discover something new. So everything the team does is focused around these themes.

In August alone the Homepage produced 142 million referrals to other areas of the BBC such as News, BBC iPlayer and CBeebies. Helped by the Olympics and the start of the new Premier League season, Sport alone received over 64 million referrals from the BBC Homepage.

The development of the Homepage is an on-going process. We are continuously analysing how the audience is using our product and working with our colleagues in Marketing and Audiences, UX and Editorial to improve our service.

Since the launch last year we've been exploring how people have been using the new page though analytics and user testing sessions which were ran across the UK.

Some of the most interesting things we noticed were

• People aren't engaging with the Flavour bar: the filtering tool, that sits in the middle of the page. We want to make this easier to use.

• The content mix on the page is feeling limited for audiences because they aren't using the filtering mechanism

• There is too much content, and sometimes duplication of content. We want to make the experience of the Homepage more focussed.

• We want to add an increased sense of 'liveliness' to the page.

• We want to explore how the Homepage could increase referrals to other areas of BBC Online.

What did we learn from the analytics?

The BBC Homepage is the third most popular Homepage in the UK behind Yahoo and MSN, we are notably the only page in the top four without an email provider (Neilsen Reach ranking).

Since the relaunch last year we have seen our weekly visitors remain stable at 9 million, although during the Olympics we saw this peak at over 10 million.

Whilst mobile and tablet usage are increasing, 75% of the homepage's audience still visit on a desktop device so it is important that this page is as efficient as possible.

On a monthly basis 40% of people who come to the Homepage are interacting with the carousel in the top half of the page. However, only 30% of total users who come to the Homepage are clicking on a piece of content in the carousel, so I wanted to look at why and find ways to increase this.

The BBC Homepage development team at BBC North in MediaCityUK, Salford

As always we would love to know what you think. Please use the comments area below or alternatively tweet using the hashtag #bbchomepage.

Eleni Sharp is Product Manager, BBC Homepage, News & Knowledge, BBC Future Media.

The new mobile homepage reflects the design of the homepage on desktops

I’m proud to announce the mobile homepage has come out of its Beta mode into a full launch and is now available at m.bbc.co.uk.

The old mobile homepage wasn’t meeting our users increased needs and expectations. We wanted to improve this experience and bring it more in line with the desktop version which launched at the end of last year.

You can read the full rationale behind the product, market context and also the key features in my last blog post.

During the beta period we were able to track usage and could see how people were using the product. Hundreds of thousands of people have visited the page and were able to see that of our beta test users, a third used the location setting and one in nine customised their content.

Thanks so much for the feedback, which was mostly positive.

We had lots of comments via emails, blog posts and across social media; all of these were collated and reviewed and where possible new functionality has been developed to help us improve the product.

There was an immediate need for further customisation options. We received 20 direct emails, as well as blog post comments like that of Egg of Maidstone:

I want several items of local news, UK news, world news, technology news, entertainment news, sport news, football news and, most importantly, My Club news. Instead I'm stuck with a couple of "news" items, a couple of "local news" items and some random sports news.

The most popular requests were Technology and F1, which we have added.

We also plan to launch additional options such as Radio 1 and Things To Do in the coming months.

We also decided that all links to elsewhere in the BBC should go to other mobile sites, as FoolOnTheHill suggested:

However, they currently link to the non-mobile version of the pages - I assume this is not as intended...

So, what else is new?

As well as new customisation options and changing the links, other new features which have been added to the BBC Mobile Homepage based on audience feedback include:

• Location auto detect – Automatically detecting your location to bring you local news and weather.
• Breaking news and sport - Introducing these modes allows us to ensure we are delivering the top stories quickly to our audience
• Four column layout – this will offer a better experience for users on new wider screen phones

Tell us what you think

As always I’d like to know your thoughts so please post a constructive comment under this blog, or tell us what you think on Twitter using the #bbchomepage hashtag.

Eleni Sharp is the Product Manager of the BBC Mobile Homepage

working on mobile homepage designs

I'm Eleni Sharp, product manager of the BBC mobile Homepage. I'm pleased to announce we have launched the mobile page in Beta mode for public use and feedback today. The Beta is accessible from a promo at the top of the current mobile homepage, directly at www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/beta or you can go straight to it by scanning the QR code below.

QR code

The opportunity

One in seven of our visitors now come to the BBC Homepage via a mobile device, and this is set to grow as 55% of mobile phone owners in the UK now own a smartphone.

The current mobile homepage wasn't meeting our users increased needs and expectations; we wanted to improve this experience and bring it more in line with the desktop version which launched at the end of last year.

The Homepage's role is to bring together all the different areas of the BBC and showcase the absolute best of BBC content, and by offering customisation let you decide which content you would like to see on your BBC Homepage.

People use mobile devices in a very different way to a traditional computer at home, so we had a design challenge to ensure the content was quickly scannable but meaningful.

Why do a 'Beta' version?

We have launched a Beta version to test the product and the technology in a live environment. The Beta period will last for around four weeks and sit alongside the current mobile Homepage. After this period we will decommission the current site and it will be replaced with the new one.

Mobile homepage in Android and iPhone

Key features

Some of the key features of the new BBC mobile Homepage include:

• Mobile friendly design - The design changes from one, two and three columns depending on your mobile device and the orientation.
• Simpler customisation - making it easier to create a BBC Homepage which is personal to you
• Weather at the top of the page - based on the useful feedback from the desktop version we have also included this on the mobile site
• Integrated location settings - Setting your location updates the weather at the top of the page and also the local news
• Location auto detect - This new feature will be released once we are out of the Beta period
• Quick links - Making it easier and faster to navigate elsewhere around the BBC
• Wider variety of content - Offering fantastic content across all the different products such as News, Sport, iPlayer, Food, Entertainment and more.
• Increased amount of content - The new site gives us more room than ever before to showcase the very best of what's happening elsewhere on the BBC at any given time.

Tell us what you think

We'd like to know your thoughts so post a constructive comment under this blog, tell us what you think on Twitter using the #bbchomepage tag on twitter or email us at HomepageBetaFeedback@bbc.co.uk

Eleni Sharp is the Product Manager of the BBC mobile Homepage

Mobile beta homepage mock-ups with two and three columns