Keeping pace with rapid prototyping
Red Badger’s Cain Ullah has been working with the BBC and News International to test new products through ‘rapid prototyping’ – so are larger media organisations able to offer quicker solutions by adopting a start-up mentality?
In our highly competitive and rapidly changing industry, the need to innovate online has never been greater. PwC recently predicted that the UK Entertainment & Media sector will grow by 3.1 per cent to a value of £63 billion by 2016, largely driven by Internet advertising.
Changes in consumer attitudes and behaviours through social media, the growth of hybrid buying models and meaningful measurement have all been identified as key challenges facing a variety of companies within the media ecosystem.
However, leaving advertising aside here, the growth in online video content and the trend of access anywhere, any time, has increased the importance of media owners’ and broadcasters’ websites as standalone destinations.
There is a growing pressure across a variety of sectors for companies to find new ways to deliver services which can adapt to changing market needs, an approach which is abundant within the start-up community.
As a result, where large media organisations may have previously been apprehensive about the risks involved in working with smaller less established companies, many are now pro-actively looking at ways that they can work with the start-up community.
They are looking to find new ways of working in order to rapidly explore new concepts, quickly prove or disprove ideas and then build on the ideas they like.
Rapid prototyping in practice
Two organisations putting this philosophy of generating, testing and implementing new ideas quickly, cheaply and with low risk into practice are the BBC and News International.
The BBC Connected Studio was set up to find new and innovative ways to develop feature ideas for BBC Online and to work closely and openly with the wider industry, including start-ups. The first event in May 2012 was looking for ideas that would make it easier for visitors to the BBC Homepage to discover content.
A Red Badger team took part in this event and developed a prototype in collaboration with BBC Homepage product manager, Eleni Sharp. It was based on the idea of providing a more dynamic BBC Homepage that updates in real-time, allowing users to spend more time there without leaving to find new content. This effectively creates a fast lane – a real-time stream of BBC content delivered to the homepage, in bite-sized chunks, the instant it’s published.
In the case of News international, the main objective was to be able to deliver new digital products for the Sun newspaper across multiple devices to reach a wider audience. Combining a team of News International journalists and editors, digital strategy experts and creative and technical expertise, an integrated team was mobilised.
An eight week rapid prototyping process was undertaken, resulting in three robust and scalable products which were designed and developed using innovative technology, integrating to live press association feeds, providing real-time dynamic content and working across multiple devices.
The importance of agility
To address the current challenges within the industry, media organisations should to look at how they can implement ‘agile’ development methods.
According to a recent Forrester survey of more than 200 IT executives, application development leaders are looking to adopt ‘agile’ development methods as it speeds up time-to-market, yields better quality results, enables early detection of issues and mid-project corrections. In addition, ‘agile’ was identified by the survey as improving IT alignment with business goals and customer satisfaction.
An agile approach is perfect when you have a stakeholder – such as a product owner – driving your requirements, when you need to be adaptable to change but also want to realise value quickly. It fits the model of delivering products effectively when the business problem is known but the solution is not.
Audience experiences
It’s widely accepted that a good online user experience is a crucial part of increasing audience engagement, yet it is often difficult to keep up with the evolving needs of your audience.
In the case of online sales, a recent report from Econsultancy and Tealeaf found that some companies estimate that they are losing the equivalent of 24 per cent of their annual online revenue due to a bad website experience.
When it comes to the media industry, major organisations publish and broadcast huge amounts of content across their channels every day and it is important to offer new ways for users to consume content in an easily-digestible way, in real-time.
The pace at which the industry is moving and that consumer demand is changing means that speed is critical. Broadcasters and media owners mustn’t be afraid to try out ideas, but will rightly not want to invest a lot of time and money in new products and functionality until they know if users are going to like them.
They need ideas that won’t work to fail fast and fail cheaply, in order to find the right ones to invest in.