| > What's commercial benefits if at all any? That's the brilliant thing about the BBC. None, and it does not matter. It's a publicly funded organization. They cannot make money by law (excluding BBC World). Any organisation as large as the BBC design their online media around making users buy more products. UX, a/b testing, research, all about making you buy something even if you didn't want to buy it. If the website isn't trying to sell you something, it's trying to collect your information to sell or provide others opportunities to sell to you. For the BBC you have none of that. That means everyone working at the BBC is working on providing the best user experience and content where you freely choose to visit because of the quality and content. Even if you don't like the content, critique the site, disagree or find faults with it, that doesn't change the fact the people creating it believe it's the best experience for a user. I've yet to work anywhere with all development being driven by UX and the UX member being one of the most respected people on the team. Their metric for success is visitors happiness, not profit from sales. They are also on tighter budgets, a political target, and legally can't compete with other commercial organisations. That means they can't always do things as well as they can do as some company will complain they are stealing their customers. That's why IPlayer has stagnated as an example. While their current lambda rendering wouldn't be something I'd personally do or recommend, it's also likely not CV building. The BBC is a billion pound, large, corporate organisation. Change is hard, deviating from the norm is hard, sometimes the process can make it hard to get things done. So ending up where they are now was probably a gradual process of trialing things over the years, capabilities of staff skills, and so on. The BBC has many faults but the lack of "What's commercial benefit" makes for doing fantastic work. It was the only meaningful work I've done in my career so far. |
https://github.com/BBC