Designing a
home page for 8 million kids 

The challenge

82% of secondary school students and 41% of primary school students use Bitesize.


It is the most popular educational site in the UK. Bitesize covers 330 subjects, with 9,200 study guides and over 5,000 videos.


The majority of students started their journey into Bitesize from the home page on a desktop computer. My team was tasked with redesigning the home page.

Research

Bitesize, being over 20 years old, has a history and a lot of strong opinions. Stakeholder interviews revealed:

• Editorial wanted their latest articles on the home page.
• Marketing wanted to advertise the latest feature/section on the home page.
• Engineering wanted to build a map for the home page.
• Senior stakeholders felt pictures and illustrations would help younger children find the content they needed.
• Nobody had a clear picture of what the students needed.

“>Moving quickly to test assumptions

I brought people together to co-design a home page based on their assumptions.
I led a session including editorial, marketing, engineering and senior stakeholders. 
We co-designed 2 prototypes and ranked children’s ability to use the homepage.

Usability testing with kids 5 to 15

We took the 2 newly designed prototypes to testing. Surprisingly to our stakeholders, the existing home page performed better.

Children using one of the prototypes said “I’d click the frog, because we are doing frogs at school”.
Our stakeholders started to ask “how do we fix this?”.

Building a shared understanding

I brought together marketing, data, editorial and user research and we plotted the research we had by age.

• We named 5 to 7-year-olds “Guided Users”. 
7 to 9 “Newly Independent Users” Giving descriptive language to behaviour, empowered discussions.
• The mixture of qualitative, quantitative and science helped us make better collective decisions based on data.
• I did lots of show and tells to build trust and encourage people to contribute.

“>Alignment achieved, let the testing begin

Senior stakeholders were on board and I had aligned marketing, engineering and editorial.

• We focussed on helping 7-year-olds and up, based on their cognitive development and usability testing.
• Children called their school “Primary” so the language was familiar.
• I applied Hick’s law to reduce the choices for our “Newly independent users.
• We wrote a hypothesis and A/B tested it.

Go live

The testing was positive and the new home page went live. We now had the trust of senior stakeholders.

• I had to compromise, the frog was still on the home page. Heat map testing showed people clicked on the frog, so we removed it (eventually).
• Bitesize was being rebranded and re-platformed so I led a small team to create a pattern library to enable a smooth launch of the home page.

Outcomes

BBC Bitesize home page outcomes:

• 1.5 million more students found the content they needed.
• Knowledge systems designed that are still used 5 years later.
• A shift in approach from focusing on stakeholder wants to prioritising customer needs.
• Blog post featured on UX Collective with over 50k reads.