More Wednesday launch madness:
I launched reboot:bbc.co.uk this morning at the CHI2006 conference here in Montreal, Canada. It’s a backstage-style competition in which we are asking the community to design or build their concept bbc.co.uk homepage.
There’s many reasons for wanting to do this – both at a corporate level and at a backstage.bbc.co.uk level.
As part of our Find Play Share strategy we’re looking at what the future of the bbc.co.uk website should look like in the medium and long term. The homepage of any website is a great starting point for thinking about how the rest of that site should be offered. I’m thinking not only in terms of visual design, but content, tone, approach and many other subtle and not-so-subtle characteristics.
Tell us what you want on the homepage and hopefully the rest will follow!
Not only that, but the producer of the winning entry will receive a MacBook Pro and have their homepage used as the official bbc.co.uk homepage for a day. There are also runner-up prizes of iPods, etc.
Like backstage.bbc.co.uk we’ve created this competition because we know that there is a lot of interest from the community to help shape what the future bbc.co.uk should look like.
Personally, I’m stoked we’re going to be able to feed up lots of ideas to BBC execs that have come from the very same people we are trying to serve.
Unlike most homepages, the bbc.co.uk homepage is there only to serve our audience. No advertisers to appease (not anyway), no shareholders, just our users. So what better way of finding out how we can serve them better than to ask them to come up with ideas of what they want?
On a personal and project level, I’m really pleased because it’s our first attempt at reaching out to the design community. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really hoping the backstage.bbc.co.uk community will get involved too – it’s a backstage.bbc.co.uk project after all. But I’m also hoping that we’ve aligned the proposition in such a way that it is approachable to the design community. You don’t have to build the homepage you can design it instead, if you want.
I really want to get stuck in more with the design community, especially seeing as I think “blank canvas” mashable-interfaces are crying out to be produced for the Mash-Up community. If this is a way to ‘break the ice’ and establish dialogues with those in the design community than what a bonus!