Well done to the team who worked on the new design for the bbc.co.uk homepage.
Go there… click on News or Sport then click back to the homepage. Try doing that a few times… Notice the background colour of box which you clicked the link from gets a few shades different?
It’s all coded so that whatever you click most gets reinforced over time, making it easier to find what you always want. A gentle, reactive form of personalisation that doesn’t take away any choices. Nice.
A lot of that code was by a clever young man called Paul Hammond. Paul’s a client-side coder, who worked in a massively-integrated way with Gideon, Julie and Caroline (the design team who you can see hilariously styled as a Matrix-style hit squad to the left) to realise this new design. Along with Annabelle who worked on the content/editorial, Andrew who is the picture editor and Steve who was the IA for the project (nifty new sensible categories box! yay!) it was a truly multidiscplinary user-experience design team which made it happen.
Great stuff and just a taste what’s to come.
Petafloptimism 
Excellent. I like that. The system adapts to show relevance based on use, a type of personalization I’d think. Do you think people will start to rip this idea off? Innovative features like these don’t often get re-done do they? They should when they provide some value. Funny that you don’t see, for instance, the code John Weir did for IHT re-used many places.
“Notice the background colour of box which you clicked the link from gets a few shades different?”
No, not in my IE6. The links aren’t changing hues, but text size is annoyingly shrinking. The fella should get back to the drawing board and hunt down the bugs.
it worked for me in IE6. Its the background color of the BOX not the links, it took me a few tries to notice it first.
subtle, useful, inobtrusive, elegant. this way lies all sorts of fruitful possibilities.
thanks for pointing me at it.
subtle, useful, inobtrusive, elegant. this way lies all sorts of fruitful possibilities.
thanks for pointing me at it.
subtle, useful, inobtrusive, elegant. this way lies all sorts of fruitful possibilities.
thanks for pointing me at it.
subtle, useful, inobtrusive, elegant. this way lies all sorts of fruitful possibilities.
thanks for pointing me at it.
um, crashed IE on my mac (os 10.2)..
all i did was click on the news link (ok, i had checked the links to business and languages first as they are my sites)….
didn’t have time to do extensive testing though..
hummm.. prolly just the dodgy ie distributed on macs though. (and i need to re-install mozilla).
A website that learns from me, without getting in the way? Very slick. I’m anxious to see the next development in this line of interaction.
The color doesn’t seem to change in a single session, but close the browser (heck, go outside and take a walk), come back and it’s changed. Neat idea. Seems so obvious now, why hasn’t anyone done it before?
I think this is a great idea, but poor implementation. There are already how many shades of blue on the page? And as you “use” a section, it changes to what? another (slightly darker) shade of blue.
If you’re talking about a section that already has a lighter shade of blue (like news or sports), it only changes to a shade as dark as the darker sections after like 3 or 4 clickthroughs. Why couldn’t they tint the section with some other color? Or have made it lighter instead of darker?
I tried clicking on a few different things, and it’s only the sections that get remembered as far as I can tell. I think individual links might be more helpful (and wouldn’t be that much more complicated to implement in static sections. — Obviously that would be useless in dynamic links like news and sports.)
It’s a fantastic idea, but what if you’re colourblind?
(I’m not, but my browser seems to be, since there’s no change in colour…)
Good idea, and well implimented (given the state of browsers), but I’m not sure if you would notice unless you’d been told.
I wonder if it would be possible to make the links you click on bolder/bigger. Then they would definately be more noticable, and slighly easier to click on.
I feel an experiment coming on!
Surely the point is that you don’t notice – the colour change highlights you to the areas you use most, without you having to think about it.
Clever stuff!
The new design is great, the bbc homepage remains the standard in design as I see and no doubt it will get copied a great deal. But at 90kb+ filesize what chance does the ordinary user have in downloading it?
Kind of nice that the color scheme seems to change from day to day as well. Or is that just a new color scheme that replaces the bluish one?
Possibilities
So the project I’ve been working on for most of the last 6 months has finally launched…
Learning webs
Matt Jones reports that the BBC home page will now subtly alter the colour scheme to reinforce previously selected links.
Learning webs
Matt Jones reports that the BBC home page will now subtly alter the colour scheme to reinforce previously selected links.
The Learning Web
The BBCi homepage has been redesigned and now learns from your previous link selections. Whenever you click within a section
BBC adaptive boxes
There’s a subtle new feature on the BBC homepage. This post on ia/ summarises: When you click a link in
BBC adaptive boxes
There’s a subtle new feature on the BBC homepage. This post on ia/ summarises: When you click a link in
BBC adaptive boxes
There’s a subtle new feature on the BBC homepage. This post at ia/ summarizes: When you click a link in
User Interface Design
Matt Jones reports that the BBC home page now alter slightly its color theme depending on the browsing habits of
The Learning Web
The BBCi homepage has been redesigned and now learns from your previous link selections. Whenever you click within a section…