Making Experts’ Voices Discoverable in Fast-Moving Comment Threads

I’ve been working with the News editorial team to trial getting journalists involved with conversations on selected articles. Two trials were done where, during a specific window of time, the author would reply directly to audience comments. I observed that their responses were often quickly buried in fast-moving discussions within the comment section. This limited the visibility of experts’ input and reduced the value of their participation for the users.

The squad working on this project never had UX incorporated into their team, so I strengthened cross-team collaboration by establishing a strong dynamic; I shared early iterations, setting up design walkthroughs, and embedding feedback loops. This helped build trust and integrate design more deeply into decision-making.

• 21% of UK population uses comments online, BBC has 34m comment views monthly on all its owned digital services
• Recent data show an increase in comments, reactions and engagement
• There’s a rising demand for participatory features across BBC platforms and social media

After the first trial, the team and I collected feedback from the editorial team and captured some observations:

• The experts’ replies were buried in discussion threads and not easily visible to users taking part in the conversation
• Editorial experimented with replying to comments and posting new comments while using @xxx to reply to a user comment, but this made it quite tricky to follow a chain of discussion back and forth

Expose comments and replies made by a specific expert — the article’s author, a subject matter expert — so that audiences can benefit from an expert’s perspective in the comments discussion, engage and interact with them.

My hypothesis was that if users see an expert comment in article discussions, they will be more likely to read, write and react more with the article’s comments.

Talk to experts emerges as an opportunity and a user need around participation, deeper relationship with BBC and demonstrate greater public value, as well as drive daily users into our products.

I reframed the problem from visibility to value: instead of focusing only on “highlighting certain comments,” I reframed the challenge around navigation and the value audiences get from an expert’s presence. This helped shift the team toward a more holistic view of participation and navigation.

Working to a tight timeline, I collaborated closely with backend engineers to ensure that proposals were technically feasible and appropriately scoped. On top of asking what problem I’m solving, I also asked myself if the solution is desirable, viable, usable and feasible — and what’s the quickest way to learn if that’s the case.

Engineers implemented my designs, which are currently live on selected BBC News articles. The team is approaching comments as continuous discovery, so we are currently monitoring the value this solution is driving and will pay close attention to the impact on participation metrics.

Our primary measures of success are the number of comments, replies and reactions in discussions with an expert, and the number of replies to the experts’ comments. This tells the team whether the feature drives increased engagement with comments, which is our main outcome.