Hamlet BBC4 December 2009

The Royal Shakespeare Company were putting on a performance of Hamlet and BBC2 filmed it. David Tennant (x Doctor Who) playing the lead. The indie commissioned were Traffic Digital, they came up with some great ideas around user interaction, such as interactive timelines and adding archive data from previous productions at the RSC in... so we did.

Jose Deniz (producer) and myself wanted a dark brooding but modern look to the site to reflect the stage production. Jose also wanted a strapline with the impact of a dramatic Eastenders plot line.

 We user tested a few different staplines on secretaries and canteen staff and this one stuck

"My father’s died,
my mother has married my uncle
and I’m being watched" (could happen in Albert Sqaure)

In addition we wanted to use the richness of the scenery and clothing of the production. Traffic were and are great to work with always flexable and friendly. 

Eurovion and Your country needs you : 2008

This project morphed from one TV show to another and the design needed to take this into account. The budget was around 80K. The timescale was around 8 weeks. I managed two freelancer designers working 'in house'. I Chased up the brand assets for the TV shows and working with the guidelines from European Broadcasting Corp  http://www.ebu.ch/  who own the "EuroVision" brand. There was a really strong editorial techincal and creative team on this project, our TPM (technical project manager) even had a Eurovision party. Overall the project hit all it's launch dates and met apporval from the audience.

Strictly Social -- Final treatment

Strictly Social was the BBC's first attempt at a prime time, full access ,second screen experience with voting and live simulcasting through iPlayer. It had a quiz, live commenting and the ability to "Boo", "Wow" and "Gasp".

After an extensive pitch process with various indies. Pancentric and Monterossa were asked to go forward with the project. I wold represent the BBC uxd oversight of this project and present it to the various meeting it needed to go through for high level approval. The design phase of the project went well, early wireframes I gave to Pancentric were iterated and translated into an interface that 'felt' as 'strictly' as the TV show. Pancentric's team did a great job with the visual treatments. Monterossa were engaged for their technical expertise with the forge platform and there own bespoke software solutions.

In hindsight,  this was an ambitious project for the timescale. Also it confused the audience because it offered too much. Arguably this was the wrong product for the 'Strictly' audience. Leesons learnt: keep these offering simpler and allow a passive user experience. ensure the technical archecture exists to handle a project of this size.

Despite these issues the project was worth while, it showed the technical boundaries and capabilities of the BBC technical framework (at the time). But it did show that with a little more time and technical infrastructure, a real time, second-screen experience could be offered a large audience simultaneously.