³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Three's New Website
I'm writing this from Barcelona at the , one of thousands of delegates trying to find the way to unlock . For the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ mobile represents a chance to make our content and services discoverable and accessible on the move and at levels of convenience that our audiences have never experienced before. There are also untapped creative opportunities to use the personal and intimate nature of the medium to try out new ways of delivering content and of using the social, participative and location aware abilities of the devices to experiment with new forms of media.
For some reason though, in ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Vision, we haven't yet made the progress with mobile that we should do. It's hard to break through the jargon that plagues every session and stand at the MWC to identify the partners and talent that will help us make these kinds of services a reality. Watch this space, though - because we will be doing some interesting stuff later this year in mobile.
However, on the web, today sees the doors open for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Three's new website, a key part of the new multiplatform vision for the channel. From this evening, viewers will see the new world that the Vision team has created for the on-air presence too, complete with a fantastic programme line-up. I won't be able to get the simulcasting, being outside the UK but thanks to the progress we've made with iPlayer over the past few months, I will be able to catch up on all the programmes I miss while I'm away.
The website has been designed, developed and editorially shaped by ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ in-house teams and the starting point was to enable ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Three's audience to easily find out what's on, what they shouldn't miss, and what they can watch here and now, whether live or on demand. Even though we know that ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Three's audience is highly technically literate, we're trying to focus on getting the basics in place. This means making sure that audiences can find and access the content they are looking for and hopefully also come across something they didn't realise they'd enjoy.
The flash TV Listings should develop into a truly useful functional tool to help people navigate to the information they need. We want to develop this to become more personalised, and it is the start of our strategy in visualising data in more useful and attractive ways. So I'd appreciate your feedback on how you'd like to see it work.
As I mentioned in my previous post about the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Three revamp, another of the innovations under the bonnet is the integration of our automated programme support engine. Now, every episode of every programme has a unique web presence [see Sophie Walpole's blog post for more on this]. Obviously, this is quite basic at the moment, but it will grow with some more social elements, such as ratings, and ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Three's revamp is the first big application of the engine. Ultimately, it will make Three's content more searchable and easily navigable as well as more findable and easier to link to.
This is just the first phase - call it Beta if you like. Keep watching the site and how the rest of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's television portfolio is revamped online, on mobiles and on other platforms.
There will be some extensive audience research going on in this first phase of redevelopment, but we also want to know what you think directly. Jo Twist (³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Three's Multiplatform Channel Editor) and the team would welcome any thoghts you have about the new site. Please do comment here.
Simon Nelson is Controller, Multi-Platform and Portfolio, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Vision.
Comments
It's visually nonsensical, impossible to navigate, and completely unrewarding to use. Was that the aim?
I'm being a bit shallow, but - while this extra functionality for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Three website is clearly a step in the right direction (congratulations) - it looks nasty. Are all of your "new media" developments going to be pink and grey?
On a different note, not all of Three's audience read this blog, and I'm sure many of them won't have a clue what's going on. Despite this being the first day of the new Three, there's nothing on the Three website about the change. I was half expecting a big link ("What happened to the blobs?" or something similar) explaining the changes in more detail than "new, shiny" explanation given by your continuity announcers. Why isn't there one?
These are just large nitpicks more than anything else - overall it's good stuff. Hope it continues to improve. :)
It's Flash. Nuff said really. It looks like it's just the splash page and the TV listings, but still, Flash...
Flash is for making funny little animations and embedding video. Making entire websites out of it is awful, and should be banned. It does stuff like break tabbed browsing (try opening a link in a new tab / window), and is just generally far slower and less usuable. Using Flash where HTML would do (and be far more functional) is a sure sign of a rubbish website, very much a case of style over substance. I do like the "Text Only" version of those fancy TV listings especially...
Content is king. I watched all the season finale of the last series of Dr Who in the rain at a wedding on a mobile phone with a screen the size of a postage stamp.
But I never really bothered with one of the Tardisodes because I soon realised they just didn't add anything to the show.
It isn't about the platform, it's about great programmes.
Oh dear, do you folks even have anyone looking at usability?
I love it. How cares about flash, it's the way to go! I watched Lilly's talk show last night on the internet and was brill! For the people who hate flash, why don't you try using Microsoft Silverlight and Air. These help with tabbed links and searching. For my age group (the target range), i believe the content is still poor, not much to watch. Put in some games, music and more culture, people do want do know about things here.
Very nice.
I am of course talking about the technical side of things. The integration with Programmes and iPlayer is brilliant, very useful to be on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Three site, hit a program and then watch it. It'd be good for it to work the other way too though, if I check out Lily Allen and Friends on /iplayer/ there's no links to the page on Programmes or the show's Microsite.
Also: live streaming, hurrah! Hopefully that will be a link through iPlayer itself soon too.
A good first step, and it'll be great for when we see if for... well, to be blunt, better content.
No. No, no, no, no NO! What have you done? *cries inconsolably* Flash Web sites are a thing of the past. It's slow. It's bad-quality and it looks tacky and cluttered. Having a "HTML Version" is not the way to do it. It should be the other way around, if you are intent on using flash for websites. Have you never heard of accessibility? It's non-existent on bbc.co.uk/bbcthree ... I'm sorry but this was a very bad move, on the face of it of course. That said, I commend you for the forward step on the technical side of it, with the new content and functionality. Bravo for that, really. But please, do something about the way it looks. I preferred the "cold and shouty" look...
I'm normally the first person to go 'oh, it's flash', but the TV listings are actually rather brilliant.
The reason that Flash is usually such a nightmare is that designers think of brilliant new buttons and effects and redesign the user interface - thus rendering whatever it is unintuitive and useless.
The TV guide is an example of leveraging the usual UI and using it to present the listings in a well designed, well thought out and usable way.
Now... you COULD have done the same thing using AJAX. If you had, I could copy and paste from the listings and they would have worked with a screen reader and so on.
So, I'm going to give a 10/10 for the design and general usability, there is still something to be said for the quite right Accessibility questions that even the best designed Flash can never overcome.
BTW, I love the "tonight's TV" link on the Live Lounge page - pictorial click-to-watch TV listings. Perfect.
I can't say that I agree Brian with the acessibility comments. I can't talk about this site in particular as the Flash version doesn't appear to be online at the moment, but generally speaking you -can- copy and paste from Flash text, it's just a simple case of ticking the 'selectable' box on the text field when you make it.
Also since Flash 8 it has been easily possible to make Flash content accessible to screen readers. The problem is more that as there is alot of inaccessible Flash out there, many screen reader users have Flash disabled by default - in which case of course they should be presented with the html alternative.
Also re: comments about Flash-Vs-Usability - using Flash allows the kind of aesthetic bells and whistles that if used correctly can enhance a site to make it more pleasurable to use, an important factor which should be taken into account, rather than usability just being treated as a measure of functional efficiency.
This is especially true with younger audiences, where something being fun, trendy and cutting edge is of vital importance - take a look at the hugely successful C³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ website, I'm sure you would agree that an html version would not have anywhere near the same impact with the target audience, and certainly wouldn't work as well towards the brand's key aim of being something cool enough for kids to want to talk about in the playground.
One thing though for the designers - surely those ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ blocks on the light sky background should be black instead of white? Nice work on the live streaming too, brilliant!
I think if ratings are going to be offered for viewers to take part in then a box must be left open for those ratings to be commented upon. I work in advertising as an account planner and qualitative research (making sense of the facts and figures) is, ultimately, much more important than the facts and figures themselves (in this case: ratings).
Wow, navigation on the right hand side - how long did it take you to get that past them?