UK Elections 2022 — Redesign the experience for civic participation.

As the world’s largest broadcast news organisation, one of BBC’s most important duties as a public service broadcaster is to report on national politics and elections. When I was called upon to design the online offering for BBC News, I was thrilled and jumped at the challenge. I knew the task would be commanding catering for such a wide audience, vitally important given the high volume of traffic, and ultimately a personal career highlight.

Since joining the election product team, this project has lived up to all my expectations, with 20.8 million unique users visiting BBC News online’s election offering on my first live election polling day.

To understand our audience and gain insight into successfully designing a national online election result, a mammoth research study was undertaken in collaboration with Modern Human, a product strategy and research agency based in London.

With the benefit of archived BBC News election experiences, qualitative and quantitative research methodologies took place with a mix of participants from across the 4 nations of the United Kingdom. To remain impartial and cover all demographics, it was vitally important we had a diverse participant list, including people from different social economical backgrounds, cultures, political understandings and voting histories.

• Understanding our audiences by publishing our archetype families.
• Capturing user satisfaction and feedback on key product features.
• Identifying strengths and opportunities to build upon from past elections.

One huge challenge our team faced was our internal platform shift, meaning we had to remotely build the election experience from scratch, with no cross-overs from previous years.

This paved the way for a new direction in strategy. Instead of continuing the same process of creating a bespoke election experience for one election weekend, we created reusable election components, that could be applied to any election format. Going forward this has allowed us to tweak already existing components to present themselves for whatever election system we use, without the need of rebuilding them. This has massively reduced workload and built time for future elections. So we can adapt our interface to show a giant UK-wide general election or a small local council election in Belfast East.

This also allowed us to accumulate our design research from all nations and election formats, ensuring all user needs are still satisfied. Once combined, this allowed us to kick off the next phase of the process which involved aligning all stakeholders to gain a shared vision through a remote ‘mental model’ workshop.

I chose to use a mental model to aid conversation during our collaboration workshop as it was a way to map the audience’s objectives when they engage with the election experience.

Another challenge which was faced was aligning multiple sectors across the BBC, to create a clear and consistent vision for an election experience. Thanks to our great research study, I lead and hosted a pivotal remote workshop involving over 50 stakeholders from Product, Design, Engineering, Visual Journalism, Broadcast, Editorial and Political Correspondents across 3 days.

Using our user research, our objective was to:

• Develop a shared understanding of our audience’s needs.
• Spot gaps in our product and content offering.
• Collectively agree on strategy and our product roadmap’s focus.

After successfully concluding the understanding phase, the outcome of our collaborative workshop left us with various ‘How might we…’ statements. These statements coherently gave us a design objective, which was agreed on by all stakeholders. The main goals were around creating an inclusive election experience for our users who aren’t engaged with politics and are not well-informed about current affairs.

Much of our engaged audience has a habit of jumping between devices, like TV or app, over an election weekend to keep up to date with ongoing polls. To ensure a clear and consistent experience, design teams from across BBC News collaborate in sharing work-in-progress designs and attend feedback sessions. This alignment is vital to keep the visual style and tone of voice continuous across our election touchpoints. We had teams working together weekly on the lead-up to an election weekend, from TV broadcasts to social media comms.

The BBC News election experience’s evolution will be in constant motion for years to come. Improvements will continually be implemented in the lead-up to multiple UK elections covered every year. Given the positive audience feedback and the 20.8 million unique browsers who visited BBC News online on the election day, I’d consider it a successful start to the new election components on our new platform.