What the BBC "improved" homepage FAQ doesn't say (but should)

[daibhidc]

How can I personalise the homepage?

You can't! Personalisation is for losers! The new homepage shows you what we think is important, not what you think is important. If you were used to the old homepage, where you could put Science & Nature front-and-centre and get rid of Sport entirely, and it would be like that when you came back, then tough.

Oh, all right, you can still set local weather, because our in-depth market research suggests that if we got rid of that, people would hunt us down and set fire to us. Maybe we'll even link it to local news, if you can find it.

Comments

[rhiannon-s.livejournal.com]

The guy in charge of BBC webdesign or something, Ralph Rivera (and does that sond like a 60s gameshow host's name or what) said it was based around "a journey of serendipitous discovery", or to put it another way "you can't find what you're looking for and accidentally stumble over other stuff looking for it". It turns out with the old homepage their reseach indicated people went to the homepage and then from there directly to a single destination page or subsection without visiting multiple others. This, apparently, is not what the BBC wanted, they wanted people to spend a couple of hours each visit going to all sorts of places from the homepage, so they made it that everything was jumbled together to force that.

And unlike Theresa May's cat, I am genuinely not making that up. If you trawl through the BBC webdesign team's blogs there is a video of the Rivera guy talking about it, and how he was looking forward to all the anger he was going to cause due to it.

Personally I object to that dreadful carousel and the gallons of whitespace. Reminds of a TKMAXX store entrance. Although at least one person thinks it is more like a <a href="http://loades.net/megabusblog/?p=1833 kebab shop</a> window. Please, if you dislike it, leave an official complaint detailing exactly what you find useless and what you feel an alternative would be. There is a campaign to get it changed, apart from anythingelse the new format does not work with a lot of text-to-speech programs which makes it impossible for partially sighted users to use it. All of this was brought up while the new homepage was still in Beta, but was ignored. http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints (select the option for general bbc not bbc online otherwise it just goes to comments instead of complaints and is sorted differently)