Local Live: A better Birmingham & Black Country news index

People visiting the Birmingham & Black Country local news index will be presented with a new design from today. In this post I want to give you some background to the changes we are making.

Why are we changing the BBC Local news indexes?

Our users have told us over time the reasons why they visit our local indexes. The main areas they value are the good coverage of big local stories; the mixture of TV, Radio, Sport, Travel and Weather content; the variety of content from different news sources and our local knowledge.

In terms of changes and additional features, they have also expressed the following:

• They would like the BBC Local news sites to update more frequently.
• They would like to see more specifically local content.
• They have expressed a desire for the BBC Local news site to be more linked to location.

So, the new design we have launched has been created with a vision that enhances our strengths and addresses our audience feedback, so we can aim to make our local offering the best available.

Local Live: Moving towards a localised micro-blogging service.

The Local Live area can be defined as a micro-blogging service of news, sport, travel and weather from your area.

It was introduced in 2013 in Birmingham & Black Country and Derbyshire and was the first attempt to change our local news sites following our user research.

The change was also based on the fact that more and more of our audience are consuming news streams using platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and we were keen to discover whether that format worked in the context of local news.

So far, Local Live has been launched in 12 local news indexes such as London and Leeds & West Yorkshire, and all have seen improvements in both audience feedback and Appreciation Index (AI Scores). This introduction of short form content to the local sites, which is updated more frequently and contains a variety of content, proved to work well in the context of local.

However for us, the Local Live launch has only been the beginning. And after the positive feedback we received we started working on the next iteration, which we are now bringing to you.

Improving Local Live: A brand new Birmingham & Black Country index.

Our aim has been to build on the success of the Local Live service and change the way local content is consumed, delivering the best and most useful local content from both the BBC and other news providers to our local audience.

Since we launched Local Live in 2013, different teams from the Product, Design and Editorial departments have been working very closely to improve the experience. We have experimented with new ways of writing content; we have tried different ways to display content, designing and building a new index; we have created new editorial tools in order to support new workflows and most importantly, we have asked our audience for feedback along the way.

With the new designs that we are unveiling in Birmingham & Black Country, we are putting a micro-blogging service at the centre of the index where not only short form content is displayed, but where users will be also able to access audio and video content, images, in-depth articles and features and be able to navigate through the Stream to discover what’s happening in their region.

Alongside the enhanced Local Live service, the new page contains the following components:

• A 3 days weather overview, which links through to the BBC Weather site.
• A link to BBC Travel that takes you to the local area’s Travel incidents.
• A Top Stories area where our users can quickly scan through the BBC top stories for their local region.
• The Local Live Stream service with all the BBC and external content relevant to the region.
• The Local area’s neighbouring regions, with their top stories.
• The latest news that other newspapers in the local region have published.
• The most popular content available in BBC News.

Finally, we are also enabling a link to a survey at the top of the page. We really want to hear what you think about our new page, so please visit our survey and let us know your thoughts.

What's coming next?

After launching the new site in Birmingham & Black Country, we’ll be analysing and addressing the feedback we receive. Our ultimate goal is finding the format that works for our local audience, so that in the coming months we can roll it out to the rest of the local regions.

We’ll continue to provide updates on this blog as we continue with our progress. We look forward to hearing your comments so please do send us your feedback.