Portfolio of Christina Fowler

Shortly after my work on notifications the app priorities moved to focus on “topics” within the BBC Sport app. Although the app already offered users the ability to follow their favourite team, competition or sport, users had to complete a separate onboarding journey to do this. Therefore in Summer 2020 I started work on a strategy for a “Personally Relevant Sport App”.

Research

Working together with other designers in the app team we brought together all the research that had been done on the Sport App in the last five years into a Miro board. This allowed us to spot trends and focus on any key findings that supported the need for a more personalised app.

I also completed a competitor analysis of feeds and recommendations within apps that are popular with under 35s. This helped us understand what users have come to expect from the apps they use every day.

Journey mapping

From this research I began to form a new user journey for the app onboarding. The existing onboarding allowed users to subscribe to notifications for their favourite teams, competitions or sports. However, after the user had told us their preferences this was not reflected elsewhere in the app.

The new onboarding proposed combining notification preferences with the ability to follow topics. This would then create a more personalised experience where users could see all of their interests together in a “My Sport” page.

I also began to think how this data from users could be used to power recommendations within the app. This was a feature that the app has never tackled before but is a key feature in all of the most popular apps that under 35s use regularly.

From the data I knew that the existing onboarding converted 27% of users to subscribe to notifications. When compared to other BBC apps this was a high number for conversion and therefore we didn’t want to lose that at all. I began to wireframe a new onboarding which included the ability to follow topics however was not a complete redesign from the previous successful journey.

Visual design

Once the onboarding journey was approved I began to move on to the look and feel. I explored a few options including a style that used all the existing illustrations but in a more striking style.

At the same time as this work some other UX designers in the team were working on a “fantasy football” project which used organic ink blotches and textures, a social media review also began to take a more organic approach. I also explored this approach and felt that this was the best option to choose in order to match the new social media graphic styles.

Copy testing

I worked with a copywriter to produce three variation of the copy that we could multi variant test. The three approaches we took were:

• Balancing instruction and motivation: “The BBC is better when you sign in”
• Instruction led: “Sign in to your BBC account”
• Leading with motivation: “Pick your teams and sports”

The results of this MVT showed that the copy had little impact on how successfully users made it through the journey. However, it did show that screen by screen there were big differences in how users interacted with the journey. Therefore we chose the variation which appeared to be most balanced and consistent with users.

The final onboarding design was launched in January 2021 and showed a strong completion rate averaging 65% during the phased release.

BBC wide impact

Shortly after this work was completed the Audience Platform team began to focus on notifications across all of the BBC apps hoping to design a consistent experience that all the apps could follow. They believed the Sport app approach was a lot of “heavy lifting” for new users to select the notifications they wished to receive up front. Instead they proposed follow should be limited to the top level sports alone and that a generic permission screen should be used to subscribe to any notifications.

This proposal has proved difficult for the Sport app to follow as the users tend to be sure of what sports and teams they wish to follow. This proposal would also remove a key personalisation feature that the app has had for over 3 years and may mean that team level notifications for match updates are hidden away and not easy to subscribe to. My work with Audience Platform continues.