Chris Thorne

It’s been a while since I did a blog post. I thought I would write about one of my favourite projects of the last few months.

Quizmaster is a new content management system for the BBC which is specifically focused on multichoice quizzes. Using it, content producers at the BBC can quickly develop and deploy a quiz. The quizmaster platform publishes to facebook, flash, ajax and mobile (Ajax and J2ME) platforms, and is fully accessible.

The project started in March 2009, with a small (but perfectly formed?) company called Kite.

[you can also read their take on the quizmaster platform.]

Back in March we were asked by BBC Radio 2 to develop a multiplatform quiz for the Ken Bruce show, an online version of his ‘Popmaster’ quiz.

As the BBCs Lead Information Architect on this project, and part of the ‘External Projects and Integration Consultancy’ team, it was my job to shepherd the project through to launch. It’s quite a simple looking quiz, but arriving at the final result was a long, and surprisingly convoluted journey.

I can’t take much of the credit for it really (most of that goes to Kite!) but there are bits I’m particularly pleased about.

1. It is fully accessible.

We tested the different versions of the quiz with a wide variety of audience. This included testing with blind and partially sighted users (result: we increased the default amount of time you get to make an answer, and increased the vertical distance between the hot spots for answer buttons in the design). Kite also rebuilt the flash version to be more accessible using tab/enter keys).

The vertical distance between answers increased as a result of user testing

We also did testing with autistic users (result: Some of the comments the presenter makes were made less negative, since autistic users we tested had difficulty recognising them as humour and got upset by them. This is something that I was surprised about at the time, although with hindsight it seems obvious – it’s one of those results that makes me love user testing!

Other interesting bits – the options screen, accessed from the quiz home page, and its impact on the quiz (again trying to keep it accessible).

[But not everything can be made accessible]

The last point about accessibility is the timer. We could have taken the timer out for some parts of the audience (for example if you have difficulty reading the answers within the time limit). However, it wouldn’t be the same game.

Taking it out would fundamentally change the offer to the audience, and the core principal of the BBC when it comes to accessibility is to offer as many people as possible the same experience.

Hopefully, with this project, we achieved that. I hope that the audience with accessibility needs enjoy the resulting experience. If not, let me know, and I’ll try and get quizmaster adjusted.

2. The design is flexible, the technology is reusable.

The same technology platform has now produced many different ‘multichoice quizzes’ for different parts of the BBC, all of them pretty quick and easy to produce, and fully accessible from the start. It would be easy to build a one-off product that delivers a small amount of functionality to bbc.co.uk. I’m pleased that we designed and built a product which has been reused many times across the BBC.

Here are some examples of quizmaster in use:

• Popmaster – the original, flash version.
• Popmaster – the ajax version (more accessible for screen readers)
• Popmaster mobile versions (j2me and ajax)
• Popmaster on facebook

• Glastonbury 40th Anniversary Quiz – Flash version here
• Radio 3 Proms Quiz- Flash version here

And an interesting extension of the original version – the 5live world cup shootout quiz (with a tournement/football match structure).

This version of the game was playable on iPhone and Android mobile phones.

An example question screen from Radio 3's Proms quiz

The Evolution of the Quizmaster

You’ll notice some subtle changes through the different versions, as we try to refine the experience. For example, the proms and glastonbury versions score points for each tenth of a second that is left on the clock when the player answers correctly. In popmaster we scored for each second. This resulted in a large number of players having the same score (not good). The 10th of a second scoring gives much more variations in scores.

Social integration

My favourite way to play these quizzes is on facebook, because it’s really easy to invite your friends, and I think its when comparing scores with friends that it becomes truly fun! [even if like me, you're rubbish, so score really badly!]

My favourite user journey is ‘Send to a friend’  from the home screen (after you’ve decided to play with sound or not), or as I called it, the ‘I forgot to send this quiz to my mate, but I like it and I don’t want to play the whole game before being able to tell my mate about it’. That button (and rather wordy journey) is one I’ll take credit for . I think its actually quite important in improving the chance that the quiz can ‘go viral’ amongst internet users.

Let me know what you think.

On the 18th of January the BBC launched ‘A History of the World in 100 objects‘, a series of 100 programmes, narrated by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, focusing on 100 objects from the British Museum’s collection, travelling through two million years time to retell the history of humanity through the objects we have made.

A history of the world - example homepage

I was the Lead Information Architect on this project. I thought you might be interested in how and why some of the decisions were made .

The project was built and delivered by goodtechnology in collaboration with the BBC. There were 3 of us in the user experience team. Yasser Rashid (Creative Director) , Tom Spalding (Senior Design) and myself (Lead Information Architect). There is an excellent post here, about the design process we (and other colleagues) went through for this project.

For the ‘A History of the world’ website, the BBC and British Museum decided they wanted to showcase man made objects. 350 museums from around the UK contributed objects, and the central function of the site is to encourage users to explore those objects, and contribute their own objects they care about.

I’m proud that in 3 months, we built a moderation system, an editing/uploading system, and a public facing website. Given the complexity of the site, I’m pleased with what we achieved.

This site is domain driven (hooray)

I have been in the department a couple of years, and have swallowed the domain driven design pill, together with the ‘Cool URIs don’t change’ pill and the semantic web pill. So, when it came to defining the information architecture for this site, I wanted to apply domain driven design. You can see the domain model I sketched below:

A sketch of the domain model

The websites core journeys are:

1. Browse the objects contributed until you find one of interest.
2. Examine an object of particular interest in detail (this is done on the object page).
3. Where an object has a broadcast episode associated with it, users can listen to that objects programme whilst examining the object.

For journey 1, the flash-based ‘object explorer’ can be used, or an HTML based ‘basic explorer’ can be used. Each of these explorers allows the user to set filters, reducing a large number of objects down to just a few. Each filter is represented on the domain model. This allows us to work out what user experiences are possible, what data is required, and the relationship between the filters. If we’d had time, we could also have used the domain model to calculate persistent URLs.

Only 2 filters at once.

To try to ensure that the user is never presented with ‘no objects’ we decided to only allow the setting of a maximum of 2 filters at once. Given the hundreds of objects, it is therefore more likely that the user will be presented with some objects to explore, once they have set filters.

For journeys 2 and 3, we created an object page for each object in the site.

An example object page from 'A History of the world'

Our Object page URLs are designed to last 200 years.

The Cool URIs don’t change paper (by Tim BL) suggests that we should design URIs as though they won’t change for 200 years. It’s a point of view I try to subscribe to. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, it wasn’t possible to apply this principle as purely as I would have liked. However, for journeys 2 and 3, we were able to ensure that each objects page was published at a persistent (’cool’) URL.

For example, the “Mummy of Hornedjitef ” has a URL of http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/sogITE3FSKStlk12qd2W3w.

This can be generalised to:

www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/:object where ‘:object’ is a GUID.

I guess this is an example of practicing what I preach, since I’ve talked about persistent URL design before (as have my colleagues).

We could have published an object page to:

www.bbc.co.uk/users/:user/objects/:object , but the person who uploaded the object may want to change their name (:user). By using a GUID for the object, we also allow the name (and all other taxonomy attributes) to change without changing the URL of that object. In this way, I hope, Ive designed a URL that can last 200 years without changing .

By using a GUID we are also better able to scale the site – we can allow many users to upload their objects concurrently, using multiple servers at the same time,  safe in the knowledge that they will not be allocated the same URL as another object, because the GUID is pretty much guaranteed to be random and unique.[OK, I'm believing what the software engineers tell me, and also what wikipedia tells me, but hopefully its true!].

Search Engine Optimisation

By ensuring the URLs don’t change over time, we can ensure that more people can link to the content, which boosts that contents google ‘page rank’. I’m pleased to see that when users search for a particular object in google, the object pages appear high in search results:

But still much to improve…..

There is lots to improve on the site, and we will be striving to make improvements over the coming weeks, but I hope you enjoy the site. I know I’ve particularly enjoyed the fact that the site seems to be attracting local newspapers to write about local history - and some of the objects users have chosen to upload have been genuinely interesting to me .

Building the moderation, admin, upload and public facing site in 3 months was an awesome challenge. The team involved were truly great to work with. The good technology team, the radio 4 team, my UX+D colleagues, and many others. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Update: 10th Feb 2010: A History of the World has just been awarded ‘Website of the week’ by New Media Age magazine. Cool! Full review here.

One of the aspects I found most interesting this year was the number of Information Architects who are no longer Information Architects. They started off as one of them, and became a ‘Product Manager’. Christina Wodtke – a ‘big cheese’ in the Information Architecture community, was one of the founders of the Information Architecture Institute. Yet, look at her ‘linked in’ profile today and it says she is ‘Principal Product Manager’ at linked in.

One of the primary reasons seems to be that if you’re just an information architect in an organisation, the usability (one of the things you care about as an IA – don’t you?) of your work can be cut. Too often we see project managers decide that when something has to be cut, the something they choose to cut is the usability.

In an agile project process, it is easy to claim that you’ve answered a user story – ‘The user can add blah to a web page’. At the end of a sprint, the project manager can tick the box. Unfortunately, what isn’t documented is that when the sprint started slipping, the usability of the feature was compromised. You’ve shipped ‘lipstick on a pig’. Yes you can tick a box that say’s you’ve completed a user story, but your target users find the new feature hard to use, frustrating, and in some cases, they refuse to use that new feature that was supposed to have been built for them.

It is one of my frustrations that, in an age where companies like Apple show that prioritizing usability throughout the business can make you significant profits, project managers continue to see it as a ‘nice to have’ a ‘well, if we have time.’

What’s the answer?

Well, I have 2 suggestions:

1. In Agile sprints, user stories should include usability statements. For example ‘A user can add feature blah to the website within 30 seconds of starting the add feature blah process’. Perhaps this should be the second sprint – the first being ‘A user can add feature blah to a website’?

2. User experience professionals could, like Christina Wodtke, become product owners.

If you’re a product owner (or CEO of Apple) you get a lot more influence over what gets implemented.

As I suggest to my IA colleagues next time the usability of their product gets crippled by a project manager/scrum master, climb the greasy management pole…..when you call the shots, you can ensure usability is prioritised.

I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of blogging.

At the Information Architecture Summit 2009 in Memphis I gave a talk titled

It went well(!), and those at the  more technical end of the IA skillset seemed to enjoy it. All good.

After my talk I kept being asked ‘do you have a blog’?

‘No’.

Up until recently my attitude to blogs was ‘they’re online diarys for people that want to shout about how great they are’. I’m not sure my opinion has shifted that much (oops!).

However, over the last year, I have found myself reading some excellent, informative blog posts. Posts like “How we make websites” are examples of the blog posting I like. Its informative, and it helps us all learn and develop.

So, that’s what I’m going to try and do here. Its a chance for me to share and learn from others.

I don’t expect to post often.

But sometimes…..

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think of my posts, and I look forward to learning from you.

C