Following its launch on The One Show tonight, Executive Project Manager Michael Burnett explains the development of a new crowdsourcing website, BBC Weather Watchers. The responsive site lets s weather photos and data in real-time, share their own weather reports via social media, and engage directly with the BBC's team of weather presenters up and down the country.
Tapping into our audience’s ion
Obviously, there are many reasons why we’ve worked on this project at this time and I’ll let my editorial colleague, Liz Howell, give the full explanation here. From a Digital perspective, I’m very aware of how ionately our audience feel about the weather.
Every day we receive bundles of emails, messages and photos about the weather. We try our best to show off s’ photos on the regular website and in mentions in TV and radio broadcasts, but there is so much quality content that goes to waste. Therefore, it’s been great to create a space where we can make the most of all our s’ content and contributions and give it the credit it deserves.
Defining a journey
A key element to this project has been to understand our audience, and make sure the site has the broadest appeal. We have some very informed weather enthusiasts out there and they clearly know their stuff, with self-made weather stations to boot.
However, we wanted to ensure BBC Weather Watchers was also as accessible as possible to people with a ing interest in weather. We wanted to make sure anyone with a computer, tablet or smartphone could contribute in some way. Hence, a responsive website, which can adapt to whatever screen size or device you have, was essential.
BBC Weather Watchers' responsive design adapts to different device
Our crowdsourcing club had to be inclusive whatever your level of knowledge and expertise, so creating a compelling and accessible journey was the first priority of our UX exploration. Much of this project has been driven by the BBC’s Make It Digital initiative, where inspiring people with varying levels of digital knowledge was important. Early on, we established the minimum level of contribution should be the ability to choose one of the renowned weather symbols to describe the weather they can see out of their window. s needed to be able to quickly and easily:
1. their Weather Watchers location
2. Create their own Weather Watchers nickname
3. Create a weather report, using BBC Weather icons and temperature
4. a photo on that weather report
5. Share that weather report on social media
6. See their weather report on a map, along with other local Weather Watchers
As well as convenience, we wanted to make the site playful and reflect the changing seasons. We’ve launched in autumn, but the site will change appearance when we enter winter, spring and summer. The other part of this was to tap into the BBC’s distinctiveness. Contributing to a website is all very well, but we wanted this to be a two-way conversation with our TV and radio presenters across Britain. Therefore, as well as a website, we wanted to make sure our broadcasters had the right tools to access the photos and weather reports submitted by our s, so they could display them on TV.
s get to interact with the BBC’s weather icons
Agile vs ‘Big Bang’
On this blog, we often talk about our ‘Agile’ approach to development, releasing little and often. However, when you work for a broadcaster with a hard launch date on The One Show, there’s always a touch of ‘Big Bang’ in that approach too. The challenge has been to marry the two approaches.
After designs were finalised, we had just over three months of development time with regular fortnightly deployments to get it right in time for the November launch. Essential to this has been to build the service on an entirely cloud-based system to allow flexibility, speed of deployment and, most importantly, scalability to accommodate various loads.
As well as a website, we have built an image er, and an tool for staff based across the UK, so that our Weather presenters can easily access and promote the -generated content and photos on broadcast outlets.
Mapping out the journey was key, as seen in this original diagram
A motley crew of dependencies
A key aspect of this project was utilising a number of existing services and tools elsewhere in the BBC. To enable s to their location meant integrating with BBC iD, so we’d have a robust system which was compatible with other BBC services.
To identify ’s location, we implemented the same ‘Locator’ tool we use on the Weather and Travel sites, recognising thousands of UK place names (GeoNames) and postcodes.
Obviously, allowing s to photos in real-time does have its risks. We needed to ensure the right processes were in place to remove inappropriate content should it arise. Therefore, we’ve taken due care to set up a quick-reacting moderation process through the BBC’s moderation team.
In addition, we have integrated the site with Google Maps, as well as the BBC’s own content publishing system (S), which is also used to populate the BBC News and Sport sites, so that our Weather team can publish exclusive ‘behind-the-scenes’ Weather Watchers content to the site.
Beta phase and super s
Of course, the proof of the pudding is getting real s on the site, ing reports and pressing all the buttons. We’ve used the last few weeks to run special workshops at BBC stations in the nations and regions. Hundreds of volunteers and super s signed up and got a first taste of the site in its beta phase.
This not only gave us useful but also started to put the site through its paces. I’ve been really pleased with the favourable reaction, and am hopeful we’ve already laid the foundations of a very special new community.
Where next?
I’m keen to see how the community grows, and listen to your . We already have a list of tasks to improve the experience, but we will need to prioritise that accordingly against requests raised by our audience. So I hope you have a chance to try out BBC Weather Watchers for yourself. Look forward to hearing from you!
