Interview with the BBC’s Future Media Technology Creative Director
Jane Murison is Creative Director for the BBC’s Future Media Technology group. She’s charged with creating user experiences for emerging devices – ones where the rules and norms haven’t yet been set. We spoke about what makes mobile different and how that affects the design and research that needs to go in to creating an emerging category of user interfaces.
Giles Colborne: What’s your role at BBC?
Jane Murison: I run a portfolio of projects across different platforms – including interactive TV and mobile. We’re like an agency within the BBC working for internal clients.
GC: What makes a good mobile interface?
JM: The best sites are ones like eBay where they just give you what’s important. On the web you can add a link here or there and it doesn’t matter. But scope creep on mobile kills it.
If you ask users, they say they expect mobile interfaces to do everything that the full-fat website does.
But if you give them everything, they discover that it doesn’t work. You have to boil down what you’ve got on the web. It’s hard!
GC: What role does User Centred Design [researching ideas with users during the design process] play in getting it right?
JM: It’s my fault if something isn’t designed properly so my job is to make sure that UCD happens and to get the right specialists involved at the right time. I’m the main ‘user advocate’ in old DSDM terms, if you like.
GC: Do you need to work hard to convince people to run usability research?
JM: I think I’m a creative director because I find it easy to persuade people to do [User Centred Design]. I’ve spent every month of the last eight years persuading people to do it.
Sometimes we don’t call it user centred design – we’d say ‘evidence based design‘ or ‘finding stuff out‘ or ‘customer feedback‘ – whatever [our internal client] feels most comfortable with.
What I say is: ‘You’ll always get feedback – it’s just when you choose to get it‘. You might as well save money by getting the feedback before you start designing.
The challenge of mobile interfaces
GC: Do mobile interfaces require a different approach to user research?
JM: Yes. The BBC’s mobile interfaces are often event-based [for instance around sports or music events] so figuring out how to get the research done in the time available and then apply your findings to other projects isn’t easy.
With mobile, context is everything. Combining diary studies and lab work is really useful. You get more of the context of use.
We all know that lab research is weird – it’s an unnatural situation. But at least you use web sites sitting at a desk. Mobile interfaces aren’t something you use sitting in a room.
GC: But you still have to do some lab research – how do you simulate the unpredictable environment of mobile interfaces?
JM: We’ve done some strange things. In one lab session we had the moderator call the users in the middle of the task. They said ‘wait, I’ve just got to get this call‘ but they were pretty surprised when they realised what was happening.
Some devices handle interruptions better than others. But you can’t do a lot to help users in that situation. It depends on the device they’re using.
GC: You’re leading user experience designers and working with, developers, producers and internal clients. What makes for successful collaboration?
JM: I think that making more than one person responsible for the deliverables matters. We spent a lot of time on a recent project drawing together on whiteboards rather than on a computer. So you didn’t have one person drawing and the others shooting it down.
And having the freedom to fail and try again – being happy with failure during the design process and learning from it.
As a team you should bond over failure, rather than get divided by it.
As a manager, you have to be careful how you present it outside the team: ‘well, that was very useful because we’ve learned something and now we’re going to do it this way.‘
GC: What are your hopes for mobile user interfaces?
JM: Open standards. Mobile web won’t be like the rest of the Web until you don’t have to dive through layers of other people’s interfaces before you get to the content. At the moment I can only give people the least bad interface.
We know mobile
Mobile is the most exciting and fastest growing part of the web. We’re lucky to have worked with some of the biggest names in mobile researching how it’s used, defining strategy and coming up with great designs. To find out more please contact us.
If you enjoyed this interview, you may also be interested in our interview with Lastminute.com’s Leah Russell.
About the author
Giles has been making products more usable for over fifteen years. He was President of the UK Usability Professionals’ Association from 2003-2007 and speaks frequently on usability in the UK and overseas. He writes on usability for Revolution magazine and was one of the editors of the PAS 78 accessibility guide from the British Standards Institute. Email Giles, or call +44 (0)117 946 3930
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Great reading and liked the themes :)