The BBC Specials team uses templates for regular story types. Because they must
appeal to all sections of society, Bella explains they try to make their work as simple as
possible without being patronisingly reductive. Focus groups (with members of the
public), guerrilla testing, and even long-term ethnographic research has been undertaken
to find out more about their audiences. They have found that a portion of the
general public are intimidated by charts of all kinds, because they remind them of
unhappy memories of studying mathematics at school. Equally, some audiences find
circles more visually appealing (they are less tainted by experience or feelings of
confusion or inadequacy). At the BBC it is considered vital to incorporate audience
research into their decision-making and processes. Page impressions, volume of clicks,
and levels of interaction on pages containing their interactives are all measured and
analysed: the Specials team have been able to iterate their work based on this data.
Most of the findings are “common sense”, but they can inform selections and routines
in practice. A general rule they have found is that in taking a prescriptive narrative
approach, more readers are likely to complete all stages of the interactive—so this
approach is often preferred to experimental interactive graphics. The choice of degree
of interaction employed is driven by perceptions of audience, not by an idealist notion
of interactivity. BBC online style is set out in a Global Experience Language