Desert Island Discs 2011

Desert island discs is a much-loved and long running Radio 4 show (since 1942). 

The old website wasn't doing justice to this very popular and much revered radio show. So a complete redesign was embarked upon. Digital design consultancy Fallon were commissioned to create a new brand identity kit (Classified) for Desert island discs. And digital agency Magnetic North were awarded the design and build contract.  

Early in the process, we was recognised there was a real opportunity to surface the large  breadth of content from the shows archive. 

A key challenge was finding an intuitive way to enable users to navigate through the 2850 shows available (approximate: it adds 1 every week) . The image on the left shows the browse and search mechanism. I was particularly pleased will the light grey indicator bars under the categories under "Explore Castaways". This gives an instant visual indication of the amount of content available per occupation, presenter or gender.

We worked though several prototypes, meetings and mock ups to get to the end result.We hope users enjoy delving into the archives to listen to the likes of George Clooney or Margaret Thatcher.

Right is a mock up of the top part of the homepage that didn't make it live. It was an attempt to integrate some the "listen live" box (top right) into the banner. Also an experiment with the "Radio 4" logo to align it horizontally

Key elements that did make it were the large image carousel instantly showing the latest shows and a highly prominent visual call to the users to search the archive.

My responsibilities on this project were..

• Signing off the designs 
• Identifying the key of functionality of each page template.
• Keeping the online offering true to the brand kit delivered by  Fallon to BBC Marketing.
• Assuring consistency in look and feel and functionality on  web and mobile. 
• Checking work against accessibility and BBC UX&D design standards and guidelines.

To the left is the final individual castaway template (if they have an image). The touches I like the most on this page are the large inviting image but most of all the circular images of the discs Alice Cooper had chosen.Visually the discs tie-in so well with the brand logo and the evokes thoughts of LPs and CDs in many people. Initially we wondered if we had a technical solution to make this possible for 2850 castaways X 8 songs. But we found an automated 'imagechef' solution that did the job.


One of the final pieces of work was the mobile site. Keeping visual treatment consistent  and offering the search and listen functionality were identified as 'must haves'. On the right is the final treatment for search page on mobile. As you can see visually it feels like the same offering as the site, with consistent colours, icons and branding.

On the mobile site we deliberately went for the most common format phone template rather than the higher end ipad/android layouts. We wanted a solution for all phone formats, so everyone can search andl listen.

If you don't know what Desert Island Discs is...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Island_Discs