Role: Lead Designer
Launched: June 2013

Awards: Lovie Awards Gold Winner

For the first time ever, the BBC live-streamed the six key music stages at the 2013 Glastonbury festival (US readers, think Burning Man with mud and rain), amounting to more than 250 hours of live coverage and streaming.  The app which brought viewers all the live streams and on-demand video from Glastonbury seamlessly to their TVs was accessed on Smart TVs and games consoles. 

The brief was to design a ‘Events' App for IPTV, which would used to provide access to both live coverage and video on demand content for events such as the BBC's Wimbledon tennis coverage. 

We knew from Red Button usage figures that music events attract large audiences with respect to live coverage, and this application aimed to build upon that success. The application delivered improvements in every area of music event coverage via Red Button, for example by offering full live coverage via up to 8 different content streams, and up to 250 VOD clips in the form of highlights packages and catch up content for all acts that the BBC had rights for.

During the ideation phase, the aim was to explore as many different user interfaces and interaction patterns as possible which offered different ways for the user to explore all the live streams and on demand content. We have fun coming up with ideas. The strong ideas were picked out and developed and prototyped hand in hand with TV engineers who advised us on the technical capabilities.

After converging on the range of ideas that came out of the sketching and wire-framing process we brought the sketches to life using elements from the Glastonbury 2013 brand kit, with video and images taken from the previous BBC at Glastonbury event.

We outsourced the build of the Flash prototype to a local design agency, and an external test lab worked with us to facilitate testing of the prototype. Six participants who enjoyed music and had various levels of experience in using red button products were brought in for a 60 minute session with the prototype.  We were able to observe these users who were given set tasks such as finding artists or stages, users were also given time to explore the prototype freely.  

After testing, we reviewed all the findings and recommendations and created tasks to explore solutions and refine the prototype, which we used to communicate and align expectations with our engineers.