Speaker: Matthew Brooks, lead R&D engineer at BBC / Intervenant: Matthew Brooks, ingénieur R&D à la BBC
« It’s a broad ambition across the BBC to make our services more personalized, » Matthew Brooks said. Brooks presented the results of a new interactive BBC tool that allows for personalization of the user experience on Instagram.
BBC recently piloted a documentary on its Taster platform that opens with a series of questions for the audience. It takes the answers into account to shape how the narrative unfolds for each individual watching. In the documentary, the Research and Development team tested, the viewer could choose an « informed » or an « entertained » experience, which affected which angle the story took and even decided which of two BBC presenters would introduce the story.
19. Which means that, on Instagram for example, the BBC gives you choice you have to make. According to your answer, the content of the information you see will change. For instance, you can choose not to see « celebs and sport » information #NPDJ2019
— Viniac (@EliseViniacourt) December 9, 2019
The experiment came out of a simple question that the R&D team asked: « Could we use that data to tell different versions of the same story to better meet the diverse needs of our audiences? »
The outcome of the Taster documentary was largely positive: 69 percent of viewers thought the BBC should produce more interactive content like this. However, some viewers felt that the experience wasn’t sufficiently personalized and were unsure about what exactly was being personalized in the content they consumed.
« There’s a sweet spot between retaining the story structure and providing meaningful personalization, » Brooks said, reflecting on the results of the documentary pilot. Instagramification and content personalization offer new possibilities for BBC and other publications worldwide. Brooks hopes that these interactive tools will create an open-source community of developers who can continue to improve the user experience.
21. Question time : in the public, some participants are worried : « What you’ve just shown us really scares me. It just adds more clusters, more closed communities… », says one of them #NPDJ2019
— Viniac (@EliseViniacourt) December 9, 2019