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A faster BBC News front page

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Re: A faster BBC News front page

#101

Post by wldlyinaccurate »

muse1864 wrote: post #69

Acknowledgements... nice bit of ass kissing there! 12 months for a single page overhaul, that's pretty costly.

When you put it like that, yep, pretty costly! But a large chunk of this project has been building up the frameworks, infrastructure, tooling, and processes that enable us to migrate from our legacy PHP 5.3 apps running in 2 physical data centres to ~the cloud~.

Also, did you read the part about we have collaborated with over 60 other developers and testers from all around the BBC to build this page? That's actually the best part — News websites are pretty simple; you just display headlines, summaries, and images in various formats. So part of this project was building the lego blocks that we're going to use to rebuild not just the rest of the BBC News site, but also parts of BBC Sport and potentially other BBC products too! So yeah, costly for one page. Hopefully very cost-efficient in the long-term.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#102

Post by luxpir »

The Guardian did a lot of work on pagespeed, made a lot of it public - I wonder if much of this was referenced. Especially given the planned 'masonry' effect shown midway down the page.

Good to see major public resources taking the lead (gov.uk being another) on reducing cruft. Most likely out of necessity, but it wouldn't hurt to start a trend :)

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#103

Post by mixmastamyk »

deanCommie wrote: post #25
afandian wrote: post #11

Can you ditch the 'breaking news' whilst you're at it too please? It's never really 'breaking' and is usually the headline of the landing page anyway. Usability wise, it's as bad as a pop-up ad. Like this, for example: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu_KsFAWgAADCJR.png

The problem isn't the breaking news banner. If aliens make contact with humanity, you better believe I want an intrusive popup. The problem is what the editorial board considers breaking news has been completely diluted and diminished both for the BBC and CNN

If the banner is always there, something has to be put into it, sadly.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#104

Post by marbletiles »

nailer wrote: post #93
DanBC wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're downvoted because you display ignorance of what it's like to work within a huge rigid bureaucracy where "just test it" mostly can't happen.

Adopting data-driven decision making requires cultural change. I understand cultural change in large organisations is difficult, you don't need to explain this. Difficulty of changing culture is, however, no excuse. The BBC is competing with Buzzfeed who've been doing data-driven decision making since inception. I'm fine with being downmodded by people who disagree, but it's worrying "get data on it" is being flagged…

"It's not "get data on it" that's being flagged, I suspect, it's "who cares what editorial thinks?". Because as a recipe for success, riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product is not a great one.

What's more, BBC News editorial has reasons to be wary of pure data-driven decision making. It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purposes, not to drive eyeballs to ads. So arguments like "the data says nobody is reading our Welsh-language output, why don't we stop doing it?" or "The expensive pages covering Cornwall are getting terrible numbers, who care what editorial thinks, CLOSE 'EM DOWN" are not the slam-dunk you might be imagining.

That's not to say there isn't useful data that can be put at the heart of the newsroom to try and capture things that matter to the BBC, as BBC News is well aware. They're building tools right now to support that [1]. But I think any editorial team will always want a way to say to its audience "we think this is important right now and you should know about it". So a constructive approach might be something more like "here is the most effective way you can highlight news to audiences" not "we don't care what you think, people don't like the breaking news ticker so it's gone, welcome to cultural change granddad".

[1] https://www.newsrewired.com/2016/07/20/how-editorial-analyti...

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#105

Post by blowski »

tomelders wrote: post #52

The BBC news page should be a HN/reddit style list, with some enhancements to identify specific story types. Every news outlet's landing page is a UX disaster, that only meets the needs of the organisations ego, and not the needs of an actual user.

The first rule of UX is "you are not your user", and you are breaking it (I'm guessing the BBC has done significantly more user research than you). I think your comment is basically "I want a website to look like this, therefore all users must want a website to look like this".

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#106

Post by rm445 »

talldan wrote: post #73
zb wrote: post #46

This does feel a lot faster, but hasn't fixed my pet peeve (on bbc.com): clicking on a link to a news article and getting taken to the wrong one because the ads loaded and everything moved just as I clicked. This often happens to me 3 or 4 times in a row. Space needs to be blocked out for ads as soon as the page renders.

Yeah, I get the same issue with another part of the page - the little 'bell' icon they use for notifications at the very top. It appears just as I'm about to click on the link for 'sport', and I end up in 'news' instead. Maybe I should just read more news.

Those of us aiming for the news link get to click the little bell instead. It's an infuriating order of loading.

Not much point complaining in this particular thread though. As the article says, 'We are essentially hamstrung by the “white BBC bar” at the top of the page.'

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#107

Post by nailer »

marbletiles wrote: post #104
nailer wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adopting data-driven decision making requires cultural change. I understand cultural change in large organisations is difficult, you don't need to explain this. Difficulty of changing culture is, however, no excuse. The BBC is competing with Buzzfeed who've been doing data-driven decision making since inception. I'm fine with being downmodded by people who disagree, but it's worrying "get data on it" is being flagged…

"It's not "get data on it" that's being flagged, I suspect, it's "who cares what editorial thinks?". Because as a recipe for success, riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product is not a great one. What's more, BBC News editorial has reasons to be wary of pure data-driven decision making. It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purposes, not…

> Because as a recipe for success, riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product is not a great one.

That's a gross mischaracterisation of data-driven decision making. The point is that non-data backed opinions belonging to anyone don't matter so much as the results of what you actually measure.

> It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purposes, not to drive eyeballs to ads.

Acknowledged, but effectiveness at that purpose is still measurable, and certainly should be measured as the BBC is publicly funded.

> not "we don't care what you think, people don't like the breaking news ticker so it's gone, welcome to cultural change granddad"

I'm unsure whether you're unfamiliar with media engineering, or simply creating a bizarre straw man of what was being suggested. Assuming good intention, and therefore the former, here's a more likely version:

"We've measured the breaking news ticker and find out it that X% of users find it useful, Y% read it, Z% engage with it, engagement with other stories happens A% more/less when the breaking news ticker is displayed over the top of it. Given that our goals are B, this indicates we should.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#108

Post by vertex-four »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #103
deanCommie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't the breaking news banner. If aliens make contact with humanity, you better believe I want an intrusive popup. The problem is what the editorial board considers breaking news has been completely diluted and diminished both for the BBC and CNN

If the banner is always there, something has to be put into it, sadly.

It's certainly not always there, at least for me?

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#109

Post by LeoPanthera »

cnorthwood wrote: post #90
rntksi wrote: post #45

always love how you optimise the news front page. are you guys still running the Perl backend and "Html Put" :) @joseph_wynn ? a former BBC News CSD here.

Nope, the Perl backend went away a long time ago! (at the point of switching from news.bbc.co.uk -> www.bbc.co.uk/news). The site is dynamically generated at origin now.

I don't think I will ever stop reflexively typing "news.bbc"...

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#110

Post by marbletiles »

nailer wrote: post #107
marbletiles wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's not "get data on it" that's being flagged, I suspect, it's "who cares what editorial thinks?". Because as a recipe for success, riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product is not a great one. What's more, BBC News editorial has reasons to be wary of pure data-driven decision making. It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purposes, not…

> Because as a recipe for success, riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product is not a great one. That's a gross mischaracterisation of data-driven decision making. The point is that non-data backed opinions belonging to anyone don't matter so much as the results of what you actually measure. > It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purpos…

> That's a gross mischaracterisation of data-driven decision making.

It is! And I'm v. pro D-DDM. But as I read your post -- given it has been flagged to death I don't think I'm alone -- you didn't appear to be calling for that. As I recall, you appeared to be saying "who cares what editorial think, work out what you want and get some damn data" (which is where the straw man comes from, fwiw).

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