Chapter 4: Using trajectories at the BBC
4.3 Trajectories as high-level concepts
high-level concepts
I now describe two instances where trajectories were engaged with by BBC stakeholders at their most abstract level, from presentations framed as trajectory seminars by Steve Benford.
The first case has led first to a reframing of trajectories as “pathways”, then as an actual BBC project named Love Festivals, while the second has led to the publication of material advocating trajectories. The first two headings below, which describe pathways and Love Festivals, are grounded conversations with the project’s producer, observations from a single project meeting, and interviews with the producer and her chief creative officer. The last section draws upon material produced by Dan Ramsden, a creative director.
4.3.1 Trajectories as pathways
This project was the first to have been commissioned as being a “pathway”, and its producer (within BBC UX&D) had been given the job description of “pathways producer”. BBC UX&D had started to use the word “pathways” following Steve Benford’s presentations of trajectories to that department. This word was seen as resonating more with stakeholders’ experience and as sounding “less academic”. UX&D teams picked up on trajectories as they were seen as addressing two internal developments: First, the BBC wanted to stop being seen as a series of disjoint “services” – such as their websites and channels – and become “One Service” that could reach audiences “however, whenever and wherever”. This was also seen as a way of addressing “underserved audiences”, i.e. audiences who seldom access BBC services. Secondly, analysis of website use by Marketing & Audiences had shown a correlation between engaging with a variety of BBC websites and returning to BBC content over time.
Pathways were promoted internally, through presentations and at team meetings. When asked how close trajectories were to BBC’s pathways, the Chief Design Officer was confident that there was a certain degree of similarity – which he estimated at around 40 %. He saw this similarity as less important than other criteria – namely “outcomes”, “collaboration” and “velocity”.
Although I haven’t been able to obtain one of the presentations used to disseminate pathways, I did ask the pathways producer, who herself had to present pathways to her team, how she would introduce them. She described pathways as a “method” to design experiences, seen as related to “lean methodologies”, as well as “a way of thinking”, “a way of working together”, a design and project management “resource”, “a way of bringing mainstream audiences to online services” and “a way of fostering being ‘one service’”. Pathways therefore describe both the outcome and the process for designing and delivering an experience. She also gave a description of the process she was trying to put into place, which started by identifying the teams and assets that would be used in the pathway, continued by organizing “brainstorming” workshops which would lead to agreeing upon a scenario. This scenario would then be given to a professional illustrator who would turn it into a storyboard. Even though the producer described this step as costly, she also saw it as essential to providing a reference that would help coordinating teams, and as a distinctive feature of “using pathways”.
4.3.2 A pathway in practice
The first project on which this process was tried out was meant both to serve an “underserved audience” (in that case, female audiences aged 16-34, a target demographic which was presented as a BBC-wide challenge at that time) and drive visits across BBC web assets. This project would engage with audiences at ten festivals with BBC presence over the summer. R&D and I first got involved with this project partway through the project, after the ideation phases. A storyboard had already been produced, showing how an audience member would go through the pathway, which involved both physical assets – a dedicated space at festivals, and balloons with the “Summer of Festivals” branding – and online assets – a Twitter account and a dedicated website.
I was invited, along with colleagues from BBC R&D, to attend a meeting for that project in London, which involved an external creative agency contracted to develop the assets needed to support the pathway, including the website, visual design elements and material to be displayed at festivals. The meeting served multiple purposes: eliciting requirements from the BBC, enlisting the support of stakeholders across the broadcasters’ services, and finally obtaining clarifications on the requirements – which meant understanding to what level the storyboard was a faithful description of the client’s wishes. Amongst constraints given by the Chief Creative Officer, this project had a very short deadline, a very tight budget, with little to no room for technical innovation. The resulting product, named Love Festivals, revolved around a website serving as a “hub” in the user journey: Audiences were invited to access this website
through a variety of strategies, including on-location advertising (tents in 10 festivals across the UK), promotional objects (such as wristbands given out at the tents) and content, partnerships with artists and presenters, and social media. The Love Festivals portal would then propose links to existing content spread across a number of BBC websites, as a way of promoting these assets to audiences interested in festivals.
Conversations on evaluation elicited the complexity of measuring trajectories. The “key performance indicator” that was suggested was engagement with downstream content – the assets that the Love Festivals portal was linking to – but a member of Marketing & Audiences told us that tracing that engagement across multiple BBC assets may be complicated due to the very small uptake of logged-in services. Thanks to a launch through the BBC Taster portal, feedback could be obtained through user-provided ratings. BBC Taster’s website indicates that 597 people have tried the portal, an arguably low number when compared with UK-wide BBC and festival audiences – but this may only include people who’ve engaged with Love Festivals through a specific link.
Beyond the metrics, the project manager considered it a success, as it showcased a new way of addressing audiences, and helped draw lessons for future projects, in particular in terms of organizing the involvement of editorial teams on in this type of project.
The images below show the Love Festivals portal and promotional material.
Figure 4.2: Promotional material for Love Festivals: wristbands and a foam heart held by artists and a BBC presenter
4.3.3 Trajectories as dissemination material
In this heading, I briefly discuss the dissemination material created by Dan Ramsden, a design practitioner, and targeted at other practitioners.
After attending one of Steve Benford’s trajectory seminars in 2013, Dan Ramsden saw the framework as useful for his line of work and presented it in two main forms: a presentation at EuroIA 2015, a conference by and for Information Architecture practitioners, and a booklet (2016), distributed through his blog. Looking at the pamphlet helps understand how Ramsden translated trajectories into his own formulation of the framework and the value he saw in it.
The introduction to the booklet presents trajectories as “a design and storytelling technique that should help you design better experience by bridging gaps […] between team members during the design process, between iterations of a design as it evolves or within individual designed experiences” (p.4). It also draws heavily on “information architecture” as the practice that he considers trajectories to inform, and reminds the reader of some of the principle of what he describes as a subset of User Experience design.
Ramsden introduces the three trajectory types, with new labels: “the designed experience” for canonical trajectory, “the individual trajectory” for the participant trajectory and “historical trajectory” for historic trajectory; as well as a list of transitions: role transitions, interface transitions, beginnings, temporal transitions between episodes, real-virtual transitions (relabelled as “switching domains”), access to resources, seams, encounters. The last pages describe “organizational trajectories”, a translation of the transition taxonomy to project management.
Ramsden sees trajectories as a way of modelling experiences, and relates them to the information architecture concept of “domain modelling”, i.e. an abstract
way of representing the context in which systems under design will be used (Scaled Agile Framework).
Most of the booklet stays at a very abstract level, with very few examples grounded in design instances – the “example” section just shows abstract curves symbolizing trajectories. The parts of the text that are closest to design guidelines are suggestions – sometimes phrased as questions – associated with concepts in the framework, for example “Consider devising a controlled vocabulary of roles that a user might inhabit during their experience” for role transitions, “Does the user have all the information they need to take the first required action in the experience?” for beginnings or “How might the isolation of a user enhance or detract from an experience?” for encounters.
Figure 4.3: An example of a trajectory drawn by Dan Ramsden