Onward Journeys

BBC TOP GEAR - NEWS AND REVIEWS WEBSITE FOR CAR ENTHUSIASTS

As part of a wider project looking to re-platform and redesign the website, the brief was to reinvent Top Gear’s digital experience to allow for content to grow, expand our audience traffic and increase user engagement, while aligning to the BBC’s Design System.

  • Goals

    This piece of work aimed at improving the website’s SEO performance as well as creating compelling content-to-content journeys to help the user read more of the content they are interested in.

  • My role

    Senior UX Designer. I was embedded in a cross-functional team working closely with Product Owner, Developers, Data Analysts, and Editorial stakeholders. I was in charge of defining user journeys, gathering requirements, prioritising work and task managing another designer.

  • Tools and Platforms

    Main design and prototyping software was Figma. Dropbox paper was used for documentation, and JIRA for planning and breaking up tasks.

    This was a responsive web project.

The Problem

After the launch of the MVP, it became apparent that the website had suffered a dip in traffic. Insights from the data team included the following points

  • For recently published articles, performance was good - the website appeared in Google’s News carousel, got promoted on Discover, and ranked highly (usually the first, but at least in the top 3 results)

  • Promoting newer content on social media would gave a large initial influx of traffic to a small set of pages

  • However, after some time, the website had a tendency to drop off in results for most search terms

As a result of this drop in ranking, our website was struggling to get in front of users who’d normally discover it through Organic Search.

Define

Working with the Data team, we realised that one of the reasons behind this drop in ranking was the limited amount of internal links we had on the website. Specifically, improving linking across the site had the potential to result in:

  1. Improved User Journeys - providing clear and relevant paths for the user to traverse the site would mean allowing the user to discover more content they are interested in

  2. Improved rankings with Google - a page getting lots of links signals to Google that it’s a valued article and should therefore be served prominently

The business needed a joint effort to tackle this and it was agreed that

  • Editorially, we needed to increase the number of hyperlinks in each story

  • Product wise, we needed to improve number and prominence of onward journeys available to our users.

Discover

With that in mind, I ran a series of stakeholders interviews as well as workshop sessions, and reviewed competitors. The aim was to explore the problem space and gather internal requirements. Specifically, I was interested in defining

  • What types of onward journeys modules our users might benefit from

  • How other publishing outlets might handle and place different modules

  • What could be automated and what needed to be editorially curated and why

Deliver

I involved different stakeholders in the process, ensuring product people, developers, editors, and SEO experts had an input. The outcome of the project consists of 4 new onward journey modules which have been designed to sit on both landing and content pages.

Most Read

Automated module which gives the user the most popular stories on the site in the past 7 days.

Featured

Curated module which allows editors and SEO experts to resurface evergreen or seasonal content to the user.

More on this

Curated module which allows editors to craft a story arc and help users dive deeper in the story.

Related

Automated module based on tags which helps users explore more of the topic they are interested in.

Learnings and considerations

This project was a great example of working in a data-driven fashion aligning the different disciplines’ efforts to tackle a core challenge. I enjoyed collaborating with Product and other stakeholders to work out a UX strategy to ensure we could increase traffic to the site.

I was also able to coordinate another designer assigned to the project. This allowed me to further develop in delegating tasks, providing direction and giving feedback.

Some of the designed solutions have been released and others are about to be developed. The team is already seeing the benefits of these additions.

As a next iteration for this work, the team is planning to run a series of A/B tests on positioning to optimise for CTR. The longer-term plan is also to start personalising suggestions and recommending stories to the users.