BBC
Intranet Project
The BBC is a global broadcasting agency, employing over 21,000 people worldwide. They came to ClerksWell requiring a spruce-up of their internal portal, which needed to be personalised, mobile-ready and easy-to-use for all its internal staff.
The Challenge
The BBC worked with ClerksWell to help refresh their internal portal: the Gateway. The aim was to design and build a cutting-edge mobile-ready solution that embodies the BBC’s mission, vision, and values. The solution was to create a portal that BBC staff and those connecting from elsewhere will use to find information and complete tasks from anywhere, on any type of device.
The Gateway should be equipped to deliver reliable, accurate, coherent and trustworthy information for people trying to achieve a task.
The Approach
ClerksWell began by gathering stakeholder requirements, with workshops with BBC content owners where interactive wireframes were used to visualise potential solutions. A user experience strategy was presented to BBC stakeholders, based around relevancy as a key principle.
The UX needed to be relevant to each user, and personalised to ensure the most useful content was appearing as quickly as possible. ClerksWell's UX team worked with the BBC's UX and interface designers to create wireframes and detailed designs, outlining all the key templates and features, all of which were usability tested.
The technical emphasis was on delivering a framework and core components to allow the BBC to continue to gradually develop the new Gateway portal. The development of the new features were split into short phases using Agile principles in which the designs and requirements were refined and elaborated in collaboration between the BBC and ClerksWell.
The Impact
The delivered solution comprises a responsive framework and page templates, using LESS to enhance ease of rebranding and maintenance, along with site templates, core web parts and other components.
A custom navigation design was developed by providing enhanced managed metadata. Many components were built using custom templates on top of a powerful search capability, allowing rapid development with custom code. The bulk of the solution was built using client side technologies and standard web development techniques, and ClerksWell also developed tools to speed up the development workflow.
- The framework is 90% cloud-ready
- Branding is consistent with the BBC GEL brand guidelines and unified across the entire portal
- Search and tagging techniques were used in development, allowing users to quickly find what they are looking for
