After the Flood designed a platform to visualise, share, and manage the diverse feeds of audience data handled by BBC audience analysts working with products such as iPlayer, Sport, and News.
Stream does three key things: it creates visualisations, provides a method for adding context, and delivers both in the form of a feed. Visualisations are created automatically, freeing up audience analysts to focus on providing insight from the data. The chart annotation function allows analysts to add a layer of extra context to charts. The annotations then appear in the activity feed, highlighting what content is most important.
Users can choose stream view – updates based purely on annotations – or a basic dashboard view. Stream presents the most useful and discussed insights from data by creating a hierarchy meaningful to the business – shown in the activity feed. The first release was created for senior executives in the different product areas of BBC FM. The system was designed to be scalable for future releases and to give more in-depth insight for product managers and content teams.
All examples below use sample data and do not reflect BBC usage data or data from their providers.
Dashboard view: Stream shows BBC audience data results in a scrolling dashboard, optimised for tablets. Each entry also includes functionality for checking source material and contacting the analyst.
Annotations: Analyst annotations can be appended to any entry and add insight to pertinent points in the data. These annotations also appear in the activity feed, which shows the most recent comments appended to data elements.
Stream view: Users can choose to view just the analyst insights.
Stream detail: The charts shown in the dashboard view are also available on stream view by clicking an entry.
An Extensible Toolkit
The Stream project continues and we’ve created large library of charts and formats which can be extended, based on the core visual framework.
