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How we built the new BBC Homepage

bbc.co.uk

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Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage

#71

Post by sklogic »

blowski wrote: post #69
sklogic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used the previous BBC android app? It worked . The new one is totally useless.

No, to be fair, I haven't. It's just tiresome how every single design change by any large website generates comments exactly like this. As somebody that has done a fair amount of usability testing, that much of why people think redesigns are unusable are simply because they were used to the old version and haven't yet spent much time with the new version. But if you show the new design and the old design to somebody…

In this case "unusable" is fully justified, it means that the entire (and, I suppose, important) class of use cases had been eliminated: it does not work offline. And the system is designed in such a way that there is no hope it'll ever be fixed.

I doubt they did any proper UX testing at all, they did not collect user stories, they did not consider all the use cases. They just hired a bunch of hipsters eager to add as many buzzwords as possible to their CVs.

Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage

#72

Post by blowski »

sklogic wrote: post #71
blowski wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, to be fair, I haven't. It's just tiresome how every single design change by any large website generates comments exactly like this. As somebody that has done a fair amount of usability testing, that much of why people think redesigns are unusable are simply because they were used to the old version and haven't yet spent much time with the new version. But if you show the new design and the old design to somebody…

In this case "unusable" is fully justified, it means that the entire (and, I suppose, important) class of use cases had been eliminated: it does not work offline. And the system is designed in such a way that there is no hope it'll ever be fixed. I doubt they did any proper UX testing at all, they did not collect user stories, they did not consider all the use cases. They just hired a bunch of hipsters eager to add a…

> I doubt they did any proper UX testing at all

Really? The BBC didn't bother doing any UX testing on a redesign of their flagship website? Really?

Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage

#73

Post by smcl »

notahacker wrote: post #41
Twirrim wrote: post #7

Hmm. While it's nice to push rendering out to clients for saving your server CPU, that can lead to a suboptimal mobile experience, requiring more CPU and battery power on the mobile device to work on the javascript and render the page. There are other factors, for sure, but you want to be keeping client side javascript down to a minimum. Taking a quick spin through yslow in the mobile browser suggests they've got a n…

Plus this is the only time I've ever seen "mobile first" interpreted quite so literally (i.e. on a desktop with a reasonable connection the mobile stylesheet loads before the main styles and content and is visible for just long enough for the eyes to register the layout, producing a horrible "flash of unstyled content" effect). n.b. plenty of people looking at the BBC site are still being shown the old style.

I've been wondering about that unstyled "flash" on BBC myself and whether it's just down to some chrome extension or something I had installed interfering with things. Glad to hear it's not just me.

Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage

#74

Post by bshimmin »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #59
_b8r0 wrote: post #26

For those that aren't aware, the BBC has one of the worst cases of "Not invented here" syndrome you'll ever see.

And yet all I see in the article is off-the-shelf libraries and frameworks, and they came from a commercial CMS - where's the NIH?

You won't find any in that article, but the BBC did build their own jQuery once upon a time (now long-since abandoned, of course, as many "NIH" projects tend to be): http://www.bbc.co.uk/glow/

Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage

#75

Post by meesterdude »

nerdy wrote: post #64

Most of their tests take half a second each to run? Some examples: "The first story displays an image and not an alt text attr if one is defined. (793ms)" "The module banner color is BBC News Red (552ms)" The 13 tests shown in the screenshot take an average of 577ms each, a total of over 7.5 seconds. 13 simple tests with wild variance in execution time. Checking a module banner color? 42ms. Checking a module backgrou…

I work on a rails codebase with some tests that take 20 seconds to run. The entire suite is normally 5 minutes. I made a ruby gem to take the entire thing down to 20 seconds, which is much better for flow.

But I agree those are definitely smelly tests with questionable value return, and would not be surprised if they do indeed rot.

Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage

#76

Post by meesterdude »

I do love when companies share this stuff. Thanks.

> Rather than using PHP or Java (that was the requisite of the Forge platform), we have chosen a non-blocking framework, NodeJS with the Express framework . This allows us to serve more simultaneous requests, increasing the performance of the application.

I don't doubt this is true, but its worth noting you can get good performance out of a "blocking" framework too. Node.js does better than others in some situations, but in this its not a snowflake, and is in some regards worse.

But I will criticize priorities: I think this is too much fad, not enough practical. the experience is notably worse than the old site, and it seems like they just threw buzzwords at their problems instead of really crafting a solid solution.

I think where they're coming from, maybe this makes sense - they needed to overshoot from their previous platform. But I think they'll find it problematic in the long run and change some of their approaches and release a new site, and that will be a good platform and serve their needs for a good while.

Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage

#77

Post by ssmoot »

blowski wrote: post #72
sklogic wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case "unusable" is fully justified, it means that the entire (and, I suppose, important) class of use cases had been eliminated: it does not work offline. And the system is designed in such a way that there is no hope it'll ever be fixed. I doubt they did any proper UX testing at all, they did not collect user stories, they did not consider all the use cases. They just hired a bunch of hipsters eager to add a…

> I doubt they did any proper UX testing at all Really? The BBC didn't bother doing any UX testing on a redesign of their flagship website? Really?

This reads like you're just point-scoring at this point.

If the site worked on the Tube before, and now it doesn't, that's a pretty massive failing.

Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage

#79

Post by acdha »

Twirrim wrote: post #7

Hmm. While it's nice to push rendering out to clients for saving your server CPU, that can lead to a suboptimal mobile experience, requiring more CPU and battery power on the mobile device to work on the javascript and render the page. There are other factors, for sure, but you want to be keeping client side javascript down to a minimum. Taking a quick spin through yslow in the mobile browser suggests they've got a n…

Your comment inspired me to use the great webpagetest.org service to collect a trace on iOS using a simulated 3G network condition:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150217_BB_Q71/1/details/

There's definitely plenty of room to optimize the time-to-first-render – in particular, switching to an async model would make a huge win since rendering is currently blocked by 6 stylesheets and 7 JavaScript files, most of which appear to be specific to certain content sections.

Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage

#80

Post by lurcio »

sklogic wrote: post #52
mikecmpbll wrote: post #27

Christ, so much hatred. I like the desktop site, I like the mobile site, and I like and appreciate that you're giving us an insight in to your tech stack and how content is published. Cheers beeb.

And I totally hate that they're wasting taxpayers money on all this crap.

I for one don't mind that they use tax payers money - because for all its many and varied biases* (national & cultural blindspots, party political) - its output is valuable and often of benefit/interest beyond Blighty.

* BBCs insistence that it is unbiased is unrealistic imo (but not as outlandish as Fox's 'fair and balanced'). Its more of an ideal rather than something anyone/org can achieve. I admire their attempts to achieve some kind of balance, although sometimes the BBC can filter too much thats not 'centre-ground' (but less so than US networks).

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