World Service Global Destination
Ensuring all users can access and engage with relevant news and information.
Early Concepts for a Dynamic Website with Topic-Based Pages
The World Service delivers news via various digital websites and media outlets serving the particular needs of audiences within each market. A centralised platform that showcases diverse content from various regions in multiple languages presents a valuable opportunity to expand the BBC World Service's global reach and attract users directly to our sites .
Challenge
The existing languages webpage is a basic, inflexible page that doesn’t support editorial or commercial goals.
My role was leading this strategic, research-led project for the World Service, driving the exploration, design, and development of a revamped global platform, while ensuring alignment with the BBC brand. I collaborated with senior stakeholders to define a phased approach based on user needs and designing scalable solutions to ensure accessibility, consistency, and discoverability.
Approach
To understand user needs, editorial ambitions, and technical constraints I collaborated with cross functional stakeholders and early on started documenting risks, dependencies and possible solutions.
To define the scope, design, and technical solution, I facilitated collaborative workshops and aligned stakeholders around key experience goals.
New feature: The regional navigation
From a user perspective, previous research indicated an interest in discovering and consuming content that resonates with their cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
To make the range of regions, we operate in, visible at a glance I designed a two-layer navigation system with multi language content. This was a key consideration from the start to help users quickly understand our geographical reach.
After a lot of trials we developed this innovative UX solution for the BBC’s global homepage that helps multilingual users easily locate their language group within relevant regions. This approach addresses complex challenges in language-region taxonomy and multilingual visual design. The solution will be contributed to the BBC Design System as part of the World Service’s commitment to inclusive, global accessibility.
Building on the MVP, I led stakeholder engagements across marketing, legal, business development, and brand teams to refine the vision. We explored content hierarchy, regional vs. topic-based navigation, and potential enhancements using third-party tools for interactive storytelling to enhance engagement.
A scalable solution with high impact and low effort
For the final concept I designed a modular, scalable homepage using reusable components and the latest publishing tools (TIPO) aiming to improve visual engagement and content discoverability across WS.
Future experiments
With no dedicated editorial team, leveraging existing content is a priority. Next, we aim to explore how BBC AI tools can aggregate top stories from all 42 World Service sites onto a central page, and automatically translate content into English or the user's preferred language based on browser settings or geolocation.
Outcome
The global homepage concept was well received across teams. Product owners saw potential for broader site application and SEO benefits. Engineers highlighted opportunities for future experiments. Marketing and leadership appreciated the branding potential and saw it as a step toward stronger digital brand control and campaign visibility. Editorial representatives are looking forward to use the upgraded features across all index pages.