12+ years making digital products and experiences more exciting, more usable, and more human.

Artist’s Studios Unlocked

Interactive Documentary, The BBC

 
 

Situation

In late 2015, BBC R&D held an open call for novel digital media concepts. My winning concept “Artists Studios Unlocked” invites users to explore a virtual recreation of artists’ studio space, fusing documentary with
gaming elements to engage the youth demographic. 

Task

Investigate the impact of interactive video on emotional engagement by designing a quality user-experience that appeals to a young audience.

Produce a pilot format that can be easily scaled and replicated.

 
 
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Research & Learning Hypotheses

Polly Morgan, a taxidermy artist, was chosen as the subject for the pilot. I visited her in her studio several times to interview her and document her work.

Next, I met with the BBC R&D team to create our hypotheses on what impact interactive content would have on a BBC Arts audience to establish a learning framework.

 
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Iterating the Initial Concept

I adjusted the concept to integrate the research findings and produced a detailed user flow to update the BBC team and user-test with an audience focus group.

Visitors make a series of choices, virtually navigating Polly’s space, watching video clips and solving simple puzzles for extra content.

 
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Agile Production Planning

One UX challenge was how to balance creating an unscripted documentary while producing interactive content that needs planning?

With the production team I adjusted the regular production schedule to create 3 shoot/edit/user test sprints, giving us the ability to adjust the experience based on feedback.

 
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Finding a Suitable Solution Partner

In order to fulfil the objective of producing a repeatable and scalable solution, I partnered with an interactive video publishing platform, proposing EKO Studio based on their matching of our project requirements.

I collaborated with the EKO team to create additional functionality that conformed with BBC Accessibility & Usability Guidelines.

 
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Designing the Creative Content

To create the navigation for the interactive,
I photographed items in Polly’s studio, isolated them and stitched them back together into a hyper-real version of her space. As the first round of content was filmed and edited, I worked with an animator to create playful interactive intros from these layered files to allow user to explore the virtual studio.

 
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Audience Testing Session

I integrated content to EKO to produce a ‘beta’ for an audience test session. I used combined biometrics analysis during an uninterrupted play/view session, with behaviour observation and qualitative testing.

In general users reported enjoying the format, but didn’t respond so well to the puzzles, so I dropped these from the final experience.

 
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The pilot is no longer active, but you can view a video on the left, or visit the BBC Taster page here.

 

Project Outcomes

  • The final interactive launched on BBC Taster in early July 2016, and was online for 9 months until March 2017.

  • Artist’s Studios Unlocked became the 3rd highest rated interactive on BBC Taster for the first year.

Learnings

The team worked with Portaplay to build on interactive video engine Eko Studio to stitch all the elements together and embed the experience in the BBC Taster website. Below are some screenshots from the final experience.