The ongoing development of our Creating Great Digital Experiences course

Regular readers will know that Justin and I have been delivering the bespoke, UC-developed course “Creating Great Digital Experiences” all around the country on behalf of the BBC Academy – principally their College of Production.

We’re about six months in, and last week I was back at Broadcasting House in Bristol, working with the production team behind the daytime hit that is Bargain Hunt.

It’s interesting how the course has shaped up and, indeed, shape-shifted over the last half year. Anyone who’s been in one of our sessions will know that there’s always a spirit of improvisation in our workshops. But in many ways, the presentation Justin put together with the Academy has become little more than a framework for a highly interactive three to four hour session (five hours in Evesham – that nearly killed me).

For various practical reasons I’ve pretty much lost the online demos. Instead, the session is a series of discussions and group exercises that run broadly thus:

Audience understanding
- Develop one, or, time depending, a series of user personas, either a core audience member or someone you’re “after”
- What do they want from your brand/show/talent?
- How are you not serving them?

Idea generation
- Think about your programme assets and attributes or themes
- Quickly brainstorm a bunch of ideas bringing together these assets and themes with your persona's personal interests and motivations. Don’t worry that most of these ideas suck! We’re going to improve them.

Idea development
- Throw out the especially bad ideas!  Get down to one or two.
- Now start thinking about them through two “lenses”: scale or ambition; usefulness vs. delight.
- You should have four versions of each idea now: useful and ambitious, useful and ‘modest’; delightful and modest (much like myself), delightful and ambitious.

Platform Choice
- Back to your user(s); think about their tech usage, think about their “situation”.
- Now start to think about what digital platforms would work best for the ideas you’ve developed.

Now you’ll note that only towards the end of the session do we much consider digital technology at all (although we will have considered the user’s tech use in building a persona of course). This is no accident – nor is it that we open the session by holding up the Spring Watch postcard as a great example of interactivity. These sessions were originally commissioned as multi-platform training. But we firmly believe that, when it comes to creating great ideas, technology – and specifically platform choice – should follow audience and user understanding.

If the exercises outlined above sound woolly I should emphasise that we’ve got tightly structured templates for them, and will happily share them if you get in touch. As for the team in Bristol? Well, they sure were young! Seriously, many were on their first or second full time job in TV. Whether we developed any ideas for Bargain Hunt in the session remains to be seen, but in any case I hope that some of the attendees take away a way of thinking, and some actual mechanisms for doing so, which will help them in their developing career.