Engaging BBC’s Audience Through Enhanced Festival Experiences
BBC
What clues were there in festival experiences which could help connect BBC to its audience all year round?
BRIEF
What are the opportunities to use digital platforms and content to connect summer season festivals with learning and entertainment throughout the rest of the year?
MY ROLES
Researcher (literature review, user and expert interviews, inspirational visit, and research analysis), Concept Development.
WHAT WE DID
1) DISCOVERING USER NEEDS
Primary research was conducted by our team of 4 over 3 weeks, covering:
- Qualitative research: 5 user interviews, 3 expert interviews, and 1 inspirational visit
- Quantitative research: 1 online survey with 47 responses
Inspirational Visit to Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2015: Seeing it for ourselves to develop our empathy for festival goers.
Interactive Interview Exercise: A relationship scale to make interviews more interactive. Interviewees rate their relationship with BBC by placing a circle on a scale from 1 (hate it) to 4 (love it).
Downloading information: Walls of data captured from inspiration visit, interviews, surveys etc. to help the team stay updated on the vast amount of data as we progressed through the Discovery stage.
Literature Review: Academia and industry practitioners' research articles kept us abreast on the latest developments on digital technology and festival experiences.
2) IDENTIFYING OPPORTUNITY AREAS
Based on our findings, we identified two opportunity areas:
- Before a festival, people made extensive plans to feel a sense of control. However, once at the festival, they adopted a more laissez faire attitude to immerse themselves in the experience. BBC Digital could look into how to fulfil festival goers' pre-festival hunger for information and their openness to new experiences during the festival.
- People wanted exclusive content, such as those pertaining to niche and sub-cultures. BBC could look at creating meaningful experiences that fulfilled their desire for diverse interests, and extend their discovery journey after the festival.
3) PROPOSING NEXT STEPS
Group Itinerary Genius: To meet people’s pre-festival need to plan their itinerary as a group, BBC could develop a Tinder-like app that could aggregate the interests of friends and propose an itinerary for them in a printer-friendly format.
Smart Wristband: People could don a BBC wristband that tracked their journey as they wandered around the festival. After the festival, a personal festival timeline could be created, which would display where they visited and what they saw at the festival. These data would be linked to their BBC ID, from which they could receive BBC content recommendations based on their festival event history.
WHAT I LEARNT
My key takeaway was that self-discipline and perseverance were necessary for me to analyse and synthesise all the information collected into meaningful insights.
It was also important to encourage one another in the team to achieve that, so that everyone had the same level of understanding throughout the discovery phase, and also the mental stamina to deep dive into the research during the synthesis process.
Maintaining a healthy team culture would be useful too, in encouraging team members to challenge one another's viewpoints, without causing hurt feelings.
Client: BBC Digital
MA Digital Experience Design
Hyper Island, Manchester, August 2015
Team: Dessy Chongarova, Edwina Nolan, Emma Crowe, JL Wong