Last February BBC launched BBC Two on a new broadband website. Broadband because it has been designed to host videos, both on the homepage and also through popups, furthermore, its interface enhances the typography design and pictures instead of long texts.

A screenshot of the homepage when reviewed.

The web designers really pushed the boundaries of the available technology, not only for the complex grid of the page but also for the Flash movie they added as background (rotating clouds)! Definitely many brave decisions in fact, despite the fact that they made many workarounds to make it as more accessible as possible, they chose to use Flash 8 as video player in the homepage (of course we know that the rapport between size and quality isn’t comparable with older versions). For the video popups they initially tried a flash menu that replaced the html one, particularly useful for anti-aliasing text ability. Later they removed this option, probably due to compatibility issues or for issues relating to scrollable list of items.

A particular feature implemented is worth a discussing. I am referring to the fading of the content of the video popup. In fact when a popup is opened to show us a video the interface of the window is hidden according to the mouse position. If the mouse is outside the window, and so presumably the user has no intention on interacting with the window, the interface fades out (get darker).

The popup with the video player.

This feature helps users to focus on the video removing possible distractions. The popup window does not cover the whole screen and leaves the page behind as it was, probably not a perfect solution yet. Of course, from a technology viewpoint this could be a problem due o the presence of two different browser instances, the window behind could be easily another software thus it wouldn’t be worth the effort. An option could probably be to resize the popup size based on user’s screen, however we know how much users don’t like this and that it would be a drama for people with more than a display.

The funny, or sad, thing is that I designed a very similar feature for my blog before I saw BBC Two website (header and sidebar fadeout after not interacting with them for few seconds), but unfortunately my blog was announced a few months later, so well done to them, especially for their courage to implement such a feature and also other tiny high interactive controllers, like the one of the homepage video, in a website with such a broad audience.

The video embedded in the homepage.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 3:28 pm by christian and is filed under gui, video, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.