Working with children and animals or, Creating Great Digital Experiences in Salford and Bristol

Regular readers or at least glancers will know that a couple of weeks back I delivered a session devised by Justin for the BBC to a group of (mostly) young grads. Entitled Creating Great Digital Experiences, the session attempts to get away from what one might call the "must get a Facebook page" syndrome, by thinking about, say, digital platform choice or the question of tech, tools and skills only after thinking in some depth about our audiences/users/customers and how digital tech might connect them emotionally or intellectually to a broadcast strand.

I'm just returning home from delivering the session - which somehow seems to have spiralled from a three-hour to five+-one - in Manchester, at the BBC's spanking new Media City facilities and in Bristol, at the rather less flashy Broadcasting House. In Manchester I was working with people from Children's (CBeebies and CBBC) and in Bristol with the Natural History Unit. Unlike the Wood Norton session, in each of these cases we were looking at specific pieces of programming and thinking about interactivity around them. Now I won't go into specifics, for reasons of professional confidence, but I just wanted to say a little bit about of the process we use and how these two very different sessions underlined the importance of any tools which help us think in any depth at all about our users.

If we have one basic tool in our toolbox then it's the user persona. One way and another, we've been doing these for the best part of a decade, in truth ever since the classical UCD approach became something of a dogma amongst the digerati of the BBC.

Ever afraid of doing anything too hackneyed, I always feel the need to introduce the process by saying something along the lines of "I'm sure most of you have done this before" and yet, it's rare that I come across many people who actually have. I think this a huge shame; it's impossible to overestimate usefulness of building a series of fictional personas as realistically as possible in order to challenge our assumptions about the people we're trying to reach them with a product. The process might be questioned by some (it's certainly not scientifically robust), and there will be some in the design community who read a post like this as though it's decade-old news, which indeed it is. But, to be blunt, it works.

In Manchester we ended up thinking about a four year old girl (Maisie) living in Salford with her slightly older brother and young single mother; with the NHU we were designing for a 25-year old woman (Amy) living at home with her parents in Guildford. Again, without going into detail, both characters - and their families - are in many ways atypical of the kinds of viewers the BBC creates for. In both cases I found that the process at the least ruled certain ideas out from the get-go: itself invaluable. But I hope we went further than that and began to circle in on some strong ideas. At the very least, I hope that the teams involved might, when neck deep in production, at least occasionally ask: What would Amy do with this service? Or, Where is Maisie when this show goes out?