No More Tears: The CBBC Rebuild

The team re-launching the CBBC website used user research and user testing throughout the design process to understand the attitudes and behaviour of their audience.  This helped them improve the users' experience and reduce the risk of any resistance to change. 

Young children often find security in familiarity and can be resistant to change.  We worked closely with the CBBC team, conducting research with 7-11 year olds throughout the project.  Our results helped the team to refine and develop the design, to ensure that children found the new site both usable and desirable.

In the beginning

Before they started the re-design, we conducted research to help the CBBC team to:

• get to know the children better
• understand how they consumed media in general (games, videos, TV etc.)
• understand how media fitted into their lives
• establish any unmet needs.

Techniques we used included:

• Ethnographic research with friendship trios -  observing children's natural behaviour with friends in their own homes
• Cultural probes - the children kept diaries for one week, completed a camera mission and a magazine-style review of the CBBC website

During the re-build

During the rebuild, the CBBC team were interested in:

• children’s user journeys
• how they navigated the site
• their expectations for the structure of the site
• views and expectations of proposed new features
• response to the new look-and-feel of the site.

They wanted to ensure that the site ‘felt’ like CBBC, and that children enjoyed the site.

We helped achieve this using:

• Iterative scenario-based user testing of different pages to evaluate user journeys and content
• Survey style interviews to determine children’s opinions and preferences for styling and look-and-feel
• Focus groups to evaluate children’s preferences for look-and-feel, and to understand children’s opinions and preferences for future features and what they would like to see on the CBBC website 

After the launch

To check how well the new site was received following the relaunch we conducted in-the-wild testing, with friendship pairs in children’s homes.

What did we deliver?

Our researchers collected both qualitative and quantitative data, adapting to the needs of the children by using child-friendly pictorial rating scales and emotive response scales.  A lot of insights with children are gained from non-verbal communication and we have innovative methods for recording and interpreting our observations.

For each phase of the project we created:

• A high level summary report 1-2 days after the testing, highlighting key findings and issues.  This rapid turnaround helped the CBBC team to progress quickly with the project and meet tight deadlines.
• A full, detailed report with practical recommendations to improve the user-experience of the new CBBC site. 

What did the users say?

When CBBC re-launched, children posted feedback such as the following:

It’s way better and way easier to find your favourite game

Posted Monday 14th March 2011

Easy to find games because they put them in an order, it looks cool and new

Posted Wednesday 16th March 2011

 
What did the client say?

System Concepts have a deep understanding of our target children's audience and the best methods to obtain accurate and informative data from them.  They also understand how to put children at ease prior to the session and how to avoid the pitfalls that can be encountered once the session's running.  I've been particularly impressed with thoroughness of their user testing analysis reports.  Very nice people to work with, offering valuable advice and accommodating last minute script amends at short notice!

John Brennan, design team Creative Director