Product experimentation helps the BBC improve the iPlayer experience for customers
“Inform, educate and entertain.” This is the BBC’s motto when providing its service to the British public. The iPlayer team is one of many that work to provide BBC customers with a better digital experience. “We always build iPlayer for the audience!” says Andy Smith, Senior Software Engineer for BBC iPlayer, in his blog titled
“Inform, educate and entertain.” This is the BBC’s motto when providing its service to the British public. The iPlayer team is one of many that work to provide BBC customers with a better digital experience. “We always build iPlayer for the audience!” says Andy Smith, Senior Software Engineer for BBC iPlayer, in his blog titled “Optimising the iPlayer Experience with A/B testing”.
This practice allows them to validate their ideas and reduce the risk of getting it wrong. Once a feature has proven to be successful, the team will iterate to optimize it further.
The BBC also recommends that organizations solicit experimentation ideas from everywhere in the organization and allow everyone to participate in the scoring and prioritization. This is why the BBC recently introduced Optimizely Program Management, which enables them to more easily collect and score ideas, view program-level reporting and share learnings across their organization.
In his blog post, Andy Smith shares more learnings and key takeaways for companies moving towards rapid innovation and a culture of testing and learning through experimentation.