We made 12 prototypes — a mix of working web pages, mockups and videos. The ideas ranged from playing atmospheric audio for a story, scrubbable videos, swiping through viewpoints, choosing your format, curations of stories, cinematic introductions and expandable explanations. Everything was designed for mobile, because that’s what everyone we spoke to used for online news.

We evaluated as we went, and developed the most promising ones further into new variations. We also tested the best prototypes with several different news stories to ensure it wasn’t just the content the users were drawn to. These are our four best prototypes.

Expander — embedded context

“I like that, if you’re unfamiliar with something it’ll clarify that”

— M, 22

The BBC is often criticised for assuming too much knowledge, which can be a barrier to understanding — things like business jargon, challenging vocabulary or background to complex geo-political stories.

This prototype, Expander, seeks to address this with additional information hidden within expandable boxes. It gives the user a clean and concise reading experience upfront but with the opportunity to ‘dig deeper’ for more information.

A yellow ellipsis icon indicates additional text: a profile of a key figure, a dictionary definition or background to an aspect of the story.

A blue “eye” icon indicates something visual — an image, video or social media embed. We call these “visual proofs” where, for example, we show the press conference the article references.

It’s simple but effective. This Generation Z audience seems to prefer information in one place — rather than links taking them elsewhere. We think this modular approach could work well for long-form journalism and for topics that need additional explanation like politics or economics.

Similar concepts can be seen in reusable factboxes on the Guardian and other places. Telescopic Text was also an inspiration.

Incremental — choose your own format

“Really like that, the long/short/skip”

— F, 23

This prototype, Incremental, breaks a news story into sections and gives you the option to consume each chunk of information as either video, short text, long text or skip it.

It’s a straightforward interaction, presented in a conversational style. It proved popular with our test participants in helping to explain the big picture: they said sub-headings and nuggets of information were easier to absorb, having content in one place is good, and they liked the option to select the length and media type to suit their preference or situation.

Overall Incremental had the best user feedback from this round. We think it could be a kind of long-form by stealth — a way of engaging people put off by long articles or lots of sidebars and related article links.

We made it look a bit message-y to appeal to this audience and so it looks a bit like the Quartz app though we feel it’s quite different. Under the hood it is conceptually object-based and the structured content could be re-used in chat apps or voice interfaces.

Viewpoints — swiping opinions

“That shows you both sides, in video form, and you can obviously decide for yourself and see what other people think as well”

— M, 24

Young audiences want to understand complex stories — the why not just the what. They also want a range of viewpoints to help them understand an issue, reason it out and form their own opinion. This prototype was informed by these key needs and offers polarised opinions on a story.

Viewpoints is presented as a series of cards. The first gives a brief overview of the issue, in this case “Should Catalonia be independent?”. The user swipes to reveal a short video arguing the case for independence, and then swipes to see the argument against. The final swipe reveals a poll.

Participants had told us about “filter bubbles” on social media, and concerns that algorithms were giving them a skewed sense of the world. Getting both sides of an issue appealed to them. They also liked hearing from individuals with first-hand experience of the issue at hand.

While we don’t think this particular execution is quite right, the concept of Viewpoints was popular, and the playful interaction was more effective than the same content presented in linear form. The interaction pattern was inspired by Tinder and the mobile game Reigns!

Fastforward — scrollable video

“You can go back to clarify, that’s good”

— M, 21

Fastforward is a new feature for digital video with subtitles or captions. It seems pretty obvious but we think it is fairly novel. The caption text and the video are synchronised so you can scrub forwards and backwards in the video by scrolling the text, putting the user firmly in control. It enables you to skim video really easily.

There is also a handle on the text area which lets you expand the text field to fill the screen if you would rather read than watch, or vice-versa.

As an interaction pattern for video it tested really well. Participants talked about using it to skip to interesting bits or to review something they missed. They found it intuitive to use once they’d discovered the function.

What’s next?

We’re working on piloting some of these concepts to learn more. BBC News Labs recently built this headlines pilot for Google Amp Stories, which was informed by one of our prototypes.

Although we didn’t aim to make structured, atomised or object-based media concepts, it’s notable that two of the prototypes featured (Incremental and Expander) would naturally be based around re-usable chunks of media.

For our next phase of the project we have the same broad brief to develop new story formats, but with a new angle — personalisation — which should push us in new directions. In the future, machine-learning and AI will increasingly play a role in serving up ultra-personalised news products and recommendations of stories to users. But what if the story itself could adapt to you?

The rest of the articles in this series:

Part 1 — the landscape of digital story formats for news

Part 3 — more news formats for personalising and understanding, and a wrap-up of what we learnt

Part 4 — what we learnt about young audiences and how to write better news

BBC Research & Development team: Thomas Mould, UX Designer. Mathieu Triay, Creative Technologist. Zoe Murphy, Journalist. Johanna Kollman, User researcher. Tristan Ferne, Producer.