BBC iPlayer on Xbox: design approach

Hi, I'm the Senior Designer who led the user experience and design across BBC iPlayer on Xbox One.

This project consisted of two core streams of work. Firstly we needed to upscale the existing app design to work across a 1080p resolution in which I'd like to thank Christian Stratham, the designer who did this piece of work. The second part to this project was designing an experience that would work using voice control.

At the start of the project we knew, that for this app to be a success, we would need to design in a user-centred way, so we could really understand how BBC iPlayer and Xbox One users would navigate around the app. We conducted research sessions with users in our in-house lab. The key objectives for these sessions were to:

• Understand whether users prefer reading aloud a programme title or a more generic label such as item 1, item 2 to select a piece of content.

• Understand users’ feelings if we were to remove the programme image to display the programme information, which is found in the roll up state of the existing app.

• Understand the correlation in language used by participant to navigate around the user interface (UI).

The first part to this research session was showing the existing app. We asked participants to imagine that they had activated voice mode and wanted them to explore the UI and find a specific programme. The purpose of this task was to see if there was any preferred language used to navigate around the app. We next showed them a prototype of how it could look in voice mode and wanted to see how users would navigate around this.

Key design findings

Users preferred reading the programme title rather than saying 'item 1, item 2' although this wasn't seen as problem when there are two programmes labelled the same within the same collection. Item 1, item 2 would help to tell them apart. This finding meant we should allow users to call out the programme name where possible. One challenge we had with this approach is that some programme titles are very long and are often shortened in the UI. To solve this, we extended the black bar so it covered slightly more of the image when in voice mode so that users are able to read the whole title.

Another finding from the research was that participants preferred seeing less text on screen and the image was seen to be more important to them. Replacing the image to show the programme information made the screen look busy, and it distracted from the green text, which is the voice call to action.

When we asked users about the words they would say to navigate around certain sections of the app, it was often very varied with no correlation. With this in mind we explored other Xbox One apps. And we took guidance from Microsoft’s Xbox One guidelines, so that we used language, which was already familiar to that console audience.

The user research session was very insightful and helped us to further understand user needs in this space. Our users expect that voice control will allow quicker access to content, often wanting to be able to deep link straight into something. A lot of effort is required when navigating by voice, so it was our responsibility to make it as easy as possible.

Leanne Dougan is Senior Designer, UX&D, BBC Future Media