From Legacy To Interactive: Designing For A Diverse Future

Kai En Ong at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/ZeX2_ZkLu4w

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Who UX&D is at the BBC

[00:00:00] I am one of the heads of user experience and design at the BBC. There are actually seven of us, so I'm not unique. And when I was asked to come and talk to you, I also got quite a long list of the things that you'd be interested in: from Lean UX, to the BBC being a traditional broadcaster moving over to digital, to accessibility, to integration, to working at scale, and all kinds of things. So I'm not getting the clicker. This is the clicker relay race, and this is the last leg. Here we are.

[00:00:48] Doug, I couldn't talk about design at scale. He's got thousands of designers. I've only got 150, so I've renamed my talk. When I was told all the things that you want to hear about from me, I just ran away and joined the circus with this group of people. I actually didn't really. That was one of the design events for the Manchester Design Festival that we ran, and it was to introduce the public to various ideas in user experience.

[00:01:20] So to set the scene a little bit. Who are we? Who is UX&D? This is the slide with the numbers, but there aren't too many of these, so it's okay. Like I said before, it's quite a big team, but it's not the biggest team. We're about 150 people and we're based in five locations across the UK. We come in a range of flavors. There's the chief design officer, there is only one of those. Various heads of UX, creative directors, designers, architects, researchers, copywriters, accessibility and assistive tech people, and delivery managers. What might be interesting to note is that we don't have developers in the team, but we do work with them really closely. I'll explain a bit more later.

[00:02:08] So here's a few of my own photographs, the places where we work. Salford. New Broadcasting House is one of the London locations. Some of the things that we like to do: we like to get away as a team, as a whole team, two or three times a year, where we talk about what we do and we share all of our experiences. We do stuff like this where we actually get up and do stuff together.

What the team works on, and how it's organized

[00:02:37] But what do we actually do for our work? The UX&D team is responsible for all the digital products from the BBC. So that goes from News, Sport, Children's, iPlayer, iPlayer Radio, all the stuff that you see on responsive web, native mobile app and connected television. The majority of the team are focused on the audience experience, and in the last couple of years we've also started to work on what we call the employee experience. So that's some of the enterprise IT, HR systems, Gateway, production systems. Gateway is our intranet, production systems and content management for online.

[00:03:21] We have been working for quite a few years on what we call the connected strategy, or the ten product strategy, for the audience. And it was interesting just to hear a bit about lining teams up behind strategy earlier today. So that means that the way that we're organized, and I'm going to a slide of a slide, isn't that meta? This just describes a bit about how we work.

[00:03:48] As one big UX team, we are surrounded and we are embedded in other teams that are part of the division of design and engineering, which is our home in the BBC. In this home, we share it with the product people, the developers, test and delivery. And we have, ooh, it's really weird when I look away. We have a centralized model where our leadership is the chief design officer, but teams are embedded in product teams. So we call this kind of federated. Those teams work alongside their colleagues in iPlayer, in the News, and so on, but we all come together and share techniques, methods and lots of other things. This is my boss. This is the guy that we do report to, but he's not actually a client.

The global experience language

[00:04:46] One of the first things that I want to cover is how you manage a team of 100 odd designers who have to work on essentially so many digital products and services, and have that desire to do their own thing. Designers want to do amazing stuff. They want to do stuff that looks good in the portfolio. They want to make their mark. So how do we manage that? How do we get people to work together?

[00:05:21] This is one of the principles of the global experience language that we've been working on for probably the past six years or so. Has anyone seen this, or does anyone have a design pattern or a language that they use? Hands up? So this might not be completely brand new, but just to talk about the global experience language and how we do this.

[00:05:53] We have a lovely new-ish site. You can find all the guidelines, downloads, articles. There's a lot on here. And GEL is one of those things that sometimes is tricky to talk about because there's so many parts to it. We have typography, we have grids, we have principles, we've got guidelines, we've got lots of information that helps us with whatever we need to create a consistent, coherent set of services and products for our audience.

[00:06:33] But how do we actually make that really work? Because designers still want to make their mark, and we've got products which have their own personalities which need to come through. So why does News look different from iPlayer, for example? What we do is we have tried to create this culture where our teams can function in these smaller groups, as I described earlier with the federated model. We are embedded within separate teams and we work closely with editorial teams to really understand what needs to be done for, say, children, or people who are really interested in recipes. But what we do is we have created a culture where collaborating together to solve the same problems is really welcomed, championed and celebrated in UX&D.

[00:07:25] So the structures, the support, the communication and the governance help us do this, because designers are empowered and they know their responsibilities around the global experience language. We have quite high standards, and say a new pattern has to work across multiple products. So what typically will happen is a designer, or one of the creative directors who leads one of the teams, will come and share that they've got a problem. They want to look at navigation, or local navigation, or something in a native mobile app. And they'll use the network and they'll ask people, does anyone have a similar challenge?

[00:08:07] So designers will come together and form what we call task forces, to work together on problems that are shared between different products. We will be quite rigorous about this. We want them to be accessible, we want things to be usable and good. So there will be a process through which designers will work together, test out what they're doing on multiple products, and once that works well it becomes a guideline, it becomes a pattern, and it becomes a resource. And this has changed the motivation for designers to work not just on things within their own product area, but stuff that will be seen across the whole of the BBC, because it will be working for multiple areas of the service. Because GEL also covers all of the platforms I described earlier, from responsive web to native mobile app and connected TV, it also means that we have different designers working together and feeling like they're part of a bigger family. So that keeps the 150 people together with similar purpose.

[00:09:15] So once you've got that, what does that give you? If you've got this team all working together with the same shared experience language that they have in common, one of the important things is that it gives us more time. No longer do designers have to reinvent the same things over and over again for different products. They can actually spend more time designing the difference and the product personality that makes something special for one product, say iPlayer versus Music. So rather than having time spent redesigning similar problems, they can actually understand and go much more deeply into that product personality and what that has to do online.

Accessibility and designing for everyone

[00:10:12] I'm going to switch topics because, as I said before, I'm trying to cover quite a lot. I'll just have a drink of water as well. I want to just talk a bit about how we do accessibility and design for everyone in UX&D. Now, we have quite a small team who specialize in accessibility, and we have another small team who specialize in assistive technology, because we're looking at both the audience out there, the public, and also employees and staff. So between them, the teams work quite closely together.

[00:10:56] But one of the key things that we do is provide to the wider group tools and training, guidelines, lots and lots of things that help them get to grips with this subject and bring it into their products. So we've set up what we call the accessibility champions network. That means that we have designers from different parts of the team all getting extra training, and away days where they can learn more about accessibility and assistive technology and take that learning back into their teams. So it makes this whole area much more easy to understand. It gives teams someone local who they can talk to and ask questions, and it really joins people up around this particular subject. So they have publicly available guidelines, and they're getting into making sure that we have tests and other resources that actually help people do this in the products that they work on.

Diversity and inclusion: counting, and unconscious bias

[00:12:03] And there's another part around diversity and inclusion that we are trying to look at in UX&D. I think it's come up a few times before, around how diversity in a team is really important. And the BBC's remit to represent and serve the nation, communities and different people, both in front of the camera and in its teams, is really important. You won't be surprised to know that we have our own diversity and inclusion team at the BBC who are working on developing and delivering strategies around this.

[00:12:39] So in UX&D one of the things that we have been looking at is gender mix. Ideally we would like to have a 50-50 mix in the team. At the moment it's probably 40-60 female-male. And in other parts of design and engineering it can actually be more like, what have I got here, 20-80. But within design it's quite good, but that's not without making some conscious effort.

[00:13:11] So I just want to share with you a few things that we've been doing to look at this. One of them has been really simple, and it's actually just to count. So counting how many women and how many men work in UX&D across time, and just monitoring this and thinking about it. And it's quite a weird thing, in that it seems that just talking about it and understanding and working through some of the questions that we have, so why have we got so many male creative directors, just that mere engagement with the subject has helped.

[00:13:46] We've also done a couple of other things. There's a piece of training that the diversity and inclusion team have done throughout the BBC which is around unconscious bias. So unconscious bias is about questioning what assumptions we make about people. And one of the things that we've looked at is how we might write our job descriptions. It's not an exact science, but there's been some research done to look at what words might appeal to male and female, and what things might put people off jobs. So we asked our copywriter to actually review our job descriptions, to look for words that are male or female coded, and just tweak a few things so that it was a little bit more neutral in how it was worded.

[00:14:39] We also think about the balance that we have in our interview panels. So we have two minutes of one interview [?]. We try and make sure there's a split between a male and a female for our panels. And we also think about, when we shortlist people, what kind of mix of gender we have. So it's something that we're continuing to do work on. I'm not going to say it's simple, but my advice is, we're just keeping going with that. And it's an area that we will be doing more work with.

Delivering at scale with a mix of methods

[00:15:15] Right, I'm going to switch again to thinking about delivering at scale. A lot of people have asked me about the size of the BBC, and there's something that I think has come up in some of the talks today about how there's such a mix of how people are doing things. Different methodologies, different approaches to management. I'm just going to share with you a few things that we do. But one of the points that I really want to make is how we actually have such a mix of things, whether it be Lean or Kanban or Scrum.

[00:15:58] I think the thing is that teams are actually empowered to choose how they need to deliver stuff. And we see in UX, because we are federated, we can see that mix between the products that we work with. So designers may work differently if they shift from one product to another. They may find that delivery method changing quite a lot, whether they use more user stories, whether it's more behavior driven development. But one of the things is places to meet, places to talk. Here's just a few shots of where we work. This is where the iPlayer team will sit. And yes, there are the post-it notes.

[00:16:36] One of the things that we have found really powerful in terms of getting teams together and getting that early user insight in is design sprints. Has anyone come across these? This is kind of Google Ventures style. You do five days, and it's quite an intensive period of time where you diverge with ideas, you converge on solving a specific problem, you prototype and you test it and put it in front of users, and that's within a five day period. And then you rinse and repeat. We found these have been really good to get product managers, development people and everyone together, because this isn't necessarily just a design activity, and it can be very inclusive in really trying to crack what problem you're trying to solve early on.

[00:17:22] Because our division in design and engineering includes both the digital and the broadcasting engineering side of the BBC, there are lots of different methods. I've come across large scale procurement where we're bringing in technology to the business, and I think there's an interesting mix of cultures coming together in this group. I think we can learn from these different ways of delivering things. So broadcasting obviously has a very different approach to getting stuff out there.

[00:17:59] I love this diagram. Has anyone seen Springwatch? Hands up. So Springwatch is a live program where they watch animals. It's fascinating. This is actually a diagram from one of the outside broadcasts, on-site places, where they're just charting out how it works. And this is the other side of design and engineering. So my tip for this is that if you have teams that can operate autonomously, and you have that real diversity of ideas, you probably need to do what you need to do that works for that team. But you can share those lessons across the teams, and that mix of approaches and lessons learned can really strengthen teams.

Trust and a healthy emotional environment

[00:18:53] I'm going to move on to my last thing, which has, I think, come up as quite a common topic. And this is just about trust. So if you're trying to create an environment where people are empowered, they're making mistakes quickly, they're failing fast, they're doing stuff and taking risks that might be quite a big deal for teams, how do you make sure that there's actually a healthy emotional environment, as I put it? How can you make sure that people will, in front of their peers, question things, say crazy things, and admit that maybe they're wrong and stuff?

[00:19:38] So building, again, that word empathy with others. How do you make people feel safe, and that they can be listened to? I think this is one of the things. As teams come together with a real mix of approaches, how do you make people feel okay about stuff? Okay about taking risks? So just to finish off, this is one thing I'd say about building teams, building mixed, cross-functional teams who really are effective: it is to be brave and to be compassionate with each other. And that's it. I'm short because there may be questions. Thank you.