Exposing the BFI national archive
About
The British Film Institute is responsible for safeguarding one of the most extensive and significant archives of film and television globally. Their dedicated teams of specialists work tirelessly to conserve and enhance the collection to ensure its availability to present audiences and for the benefit of generations to come.
Year · 2014
Job Title · User Experience Architect
Company · Ostmodern
Year · 2014 Job Title · User Experience Architect Company · Ostmodern
The Challenge
The British Film Institute aimed to create a platform to showcase the extensive national archive. Their archival materials depicted diverse locations spanning various decades in British history. The BFI wanted to showcase rich content in an immersive and interactive manner.
Design Process
Understanding Users
At the beginning of the project I created personas by using the client’s data, my knowledge of the industry as well as interviewing key users. From this, I used my learnings throughout the whole project so the user was always at the forefront.
Early in the project, it was clear that with such an amazing archive of content that would have a personal connection to people, primarily through location, the footage had to be shown on a map.
I began to analyse the data and plot the content on a map to see how the data looked across the UK.
Mapping User Journeys & Logic
I sketched out different concepts around sentimental tasks and location exploration whilst beginning to think about how we could display this content on a map. I led the presentation and talked the client through the whiteboard.
Defining Architecture
I began to flesh out the user journeys. Once the user no longer wanted to view the content on a map, we could take them to a cluster view. This would be a collection based page where the user can explore archived films all in one place.
Communicating Designs
Once defined, we had to put the user journeys into wireframes. This document was created and updated as the project became more defined going back and forth with whiteboard sketching.
