if viewers can’t find it»

part two:

leverage points

«It’s no point havingfabulous content

Designing a digital platform for visualizing half a century of archived NRK productions.

Eirik Haugen Murvold

The Oslo School of Architecture and DesignThe Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation

As a conclusion to the reasearch by design phase, I stated that the design should adress the archetype of the explorer. However, other aspects also influenced the design proposals, such as the Norwaco agreement. Hence the designs are the outcome of these limitations.

Designing for a user

NRK: Øyeblikk

Mitt NRK

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NRK: Historie

As the mapping phase continued, ideas and concepts were noted down in the notes app as they came.

From ideas to concepts

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NRK: Historie

These are the three design directions that uncovered themselves as the mapping phase came to a close. They are each different from each other, but similar in some ways. In most of them I asked myself not “How can this content be presented?”, but rather “How can this content be presented in an engaging and interesting way to the user?”. Where the first question deals mostly with the information architecture of the task, the latter deals with both information architecture and the user experience and user involvment.

Also, the framework for syntezising the different ideas followed the following rule; an incremental, an in-between and a radical change. Incremental in this context means that it doesn’t challenge the existing rules and regulations of how the material can ve viewed and presented. The radical however challenges the rules og the actor’s guild of Norway quite a lot, and hence would be a better fit for a future concept when the laws and regulations have been reviewed, as they will be in some years.

Design directions

NRK: Øyeblikk Mitt NRK

This direction puts the historical graph in the center of the concept and asks “What can we do with this?”. The graph directly shows what videos are available from each year, from the start of norwegian televison history up until today. You as a user can easily get a quick oversight of what exists from when, and you probably know what years are most relevant for you.

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Transparency in the system means that the user can easily see how much content is available online, and one can also easily see when something new has been added to the archive.

One aspect could be for the user to see what areas he or she has explored the most, and possibly also what the rest of the visitors have explored. Could one be curios to explore a “blank” are?

Would the user be interested in seeing how much he or she has watched from each year? This would pssibly be very bad for completionists like me.

Merging the graph with the categories, one could see the evolution of different categories though the decades.

ConsumptionTransparency DistributionHeat map

The direction of this concept is about how I’ve seen how people use the archives as it is now. Everyone who I’ve talked to who has been in the archives and seen what is there all shows me the most “extreme” video that they’ve come across – i.e. the longest opening sequence. This concept takes advantage of this habit and makes a system out of it; watching shorter videos in the same type of category – moments of TV history.

NRK: øyeblikk

When watching a vidoe, the user will be able to choose a certain clip within the vidoe (using the index points), and nominate this clip for a certain category or make a new category.

If a clip within a video already has been nominated within a catgory, this should be visualised and the user will be able to follow a link to a complete list of videos within that category.

Within this list, i.e. “Silly opening sequences”, the user can explore a number of videos within the same category. The user can vote on the video clips, making a list of categories from best in the top,

for example with a top three, and going down with less votes. This makes it easy for the user to share different clips (or links to clips at least, depending on the actors guild agreement) on different social media.

Find Watch Explore

This direction is about giving back to the user and giving him the ownership of the archived material. The philosophy behind this is that the user is the one who pays the television license fee, so he is actually the owner of the material. Hence, the user and owner should be allowed to make packages or collections of his material. Collections related to his childhood, where he’s living or simply his NRK memories.

Mitt NRK

Collect ExploreWatch

All users has a different relationship to different NRK archived content. Where some of us grew up with nothing to watch but NRK, someone else may not have watched much of NRKs content untill they were

grown-ups and watched more adult material.

No matter what, the user should be able to go on an exploration or “hunt” for material to build packages – “My childhood”, “Funniest clips” or “Shots from my home town” are some of the categories they could make. With a package fully collected,

the user could store all his or hers packages and watch them over and over again.

With a private or public setting for the packages, the user could watch other’s packages and browse through similar, recommended, populara, featured packages and so on.

Archive publishing

Interaction designer

Nina

Kjartan

Marte

Media editor

Gunnar

Media player publishing

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The mapping phase, ideation and the three concepts were presented for a group of people working at NRK, where most of them were directly working with archive publishing.

The concepts were talked about, specifically the feasability of each of them, the philosophy behind them and their opportunities. Some funtions were added and some removed. Hence the concepts were adjusted through co-creation.

The conclusion to the workshop was, as I’ve pointed out before, that only visualizing and making the content accessible is not enough – the user need to be involved. Hence, the direction to take the project further became a merge between the “NRK: historie” and “NRK: øyeblikk”. Seeing the historical perspective is very interesting, and getting an easy access to the most important moments in the archive is also essential to the user.

Co-creation

Starting point for developing

prototypes