Brief Description
This project was my entry for the 2014 D&AD New Blood Awards competition.
'BBC Global' is a Social media platform for citizen journalism.
It is a concept I created which allows people around the world to become journalists by reporting stories in their area and sharing them through the 'BBC Global' app. Their stories are rated by other users on the quality of the content which in turn helps distinguish good articles from bad ones and encourages people to create good content.
Additional information
The idea behind BBC global was heavily influenced by an essay I wrote for a cultural
and critical studies modules at University. In this essay, I explored the concept known as gamification. Gamification is applying game mechanics to a non-game environment to increase user engagement. Furthermore, The design is also influenced by social media platforms such as Facebook, twitter and Reddit. I found that these websites are so successful because they were very good at using the behaviour model which consists of three things: Motivation, Ability and trigger. I made sure in the design process my app
would cater to all three.
and critical studies modules at University. In this essay, I explored the concept known as gamification. Gamification is applying game mechanics to a non-game environment to increase user engagement. Furthermore, The design is also influenced by social media platforms such as Facebook, twitter and Reddit. I found that these websites are so successful because they were very good at using the behaviour model which consists of three things: Motivation, Ability and trigger. I made sure in the design process my app
would cater to all three.
I started this project by researching the BBC. I found that the BBC has a different theme behind every one of their major services (e.g. iPlayer has a black and pink colour scheme and BBC News has a red colour scheme). This is what lead me to choose green as a colour scheme as it is not used in any other BBC services and the colour green can be associated with the earth or the "globe".
I then went on to research successful news websites and found they all had a big focus on their comments systems. Users could rate comments to make them appear higher or lower on the list depending on how they are rated. This gave me an idea to apply a system like this to all content that is featured in BBC global. This would, in turn, push all the good content to the top of the list and keep the bad content on the bottom, meaning that good content gets seen and rated more, allowing the creator to level up and motivating them to keep posting good content.
I thought it was very important for the user to always be rewarded so that they are more engaged. That is why I came up with the ranking system where it's very easy to level up as the user only need 100 points but it's harder to unlock new borders which go on the profile picture meaning that the user is always rewarded by reaching a new level.
The reason why a user would want to unlock new borders is that the first thing other users see when looking at an article posted by the said user is their profile picture. The better the border is, the more likely the other user is to click on the article and read it. This
will motivate the user to level up to get a bigger audience as well as being an active member and comment on and rate other articles (as everything the user does in the app gets them points).
will motivate the user to level up to get a bigger audience as well as being an active member and comment on and rate other articles (as everything the user does in the app gets them points).
If there is a new user who is very talented but is struggling to get an audience I have created the 'BBC Approved stamp'. This stamp can be awarded to anyone, no matter what level they are, by a member of the BBC Global staff member. When it is awarded a small BBC logo stamp appears on the user's profile picture. This will show other users that this is a talented journalist.
