When the BBC first asked UIC Digital to help rework the BBC Worldwide Store, it was the start of a long and fruitful relationship. One we’ve nurtured and delivered upon for nearly a decade. Now, with complex technical projects for services like BBC Learning English as our foundation, we’re the BBC’s agency of choice for UX, UI, development and design support, with nearly 20 of our own embedded in its teams.

The BBC is the world’s oldest national broadcaster and also the largest, with over 20,000 staff. Globally, it reaches just under half a billion people and is widely respected by countries all over the world as being the finest example of a public service broadcaster. If you’re reading this from the UK, doesn’t that make you feel lucky? With such a huge following, schedule of programmes, suite of apps, websites and services, running the BBC on all counts is a huge undertaking. Specifically, its tech, UX, UI and design needs are vast, with constant innovation in motion. And despite its huge size, sometimes even a goliath needs a helping hand.

The Work

In 2015, help arrived. Working hand-in-hand with the Beeb, we were first asked to help with the UX and development of the BBC Worldwide Store, a service that gave anybody outside the UK the opportunity to buy and watch programmes anywhere in the world. Although the service was eventually wound down in 2017, UIC Digital would be the main port of call for ongoing support and maintenance throughout – setting the tone for a long and fruitful relationship with the BBC that still stands strong today.

Based on this foundation of work, we have become the BBC’s trusted delivery partner for projects, large and small, across UX, UI, development and design. It’s a relationship so successful, we’re now embedding teams of our people in teams of their people, working alongside one another closer than ever before. As the story shows below, it demonstrates our ability as an agency partner to form long, trusted relationships with our clients that stand the test of time. 

A foundation of complex delivery

We’re now woven within the fabric of the BBC’s tech and design teams but, before this, we had to build on our reputation for delivering complex projects with evolving flexibility. We achieved this with nearly a decade’s worth of ongoing, high impact work, for services like the BBC’s Learning English programme.

As part of the BBC World Service, BBC Learning English has been teaching people how to speak the language since 1943, with free audio, video and text to students globally, from Latin America to China. The resources are often delivered by full courses but much of the material is also available standalone, giving students the freedom and flexibility to learn how they learn best.

In 2018, we were tasked with helping the BBC take back ownership of its Learning English content, often scraped and plagiarised by unofficial rip-off merchants pushing their own programmes – occasionally even impersonating the BBC itself. Working closely with the BBC’s own Learning English team, we created a hybrid team built of product and backend owners within the BBC, combined with our own project managers and React Native app developers. 

Originally on the radio and later a dedicated website, the answer was to create owned and operated iOS and Android mobile apps, to wear the badge and make clear the official source of the BBC’s Learning English programme. It would also bring BBC Learning English into the modern world, available on the go and in bite-sized chunks. Being as the data only existed in web format, making this work for two mobile app UIs was a technical challenge. Using a web-based API, we had to be smart about client-side caching, scheduling data downloads and, of course, designing a UI and BFF (backend for frontend) solution that only pulled this data as and when necessary to optimise performance for the user. Shortly after launching, the app received a 5-star review in Web User magazine, 1M+ downloads in the first month and over 5M+ downloads on Android to date.

Move forward to 2020, and the BBC again asked us to step in to help with its internal branding facility – a service that manages the approval and distribution of brand assets to partners, advertisers and organisations that feature the Beeb. Within a tight timeframe, we built the backend and frontend, including infosec penetration testing. Although not available to the public, this unknown facility is crucial to the BBC, enabling managers to sort requests, allocate workflows for approvals up the chain and issue contracts. It’s a complex beast. Years later, the BBC is still using this internal tool without issue and zero bug fix requests.

Using hybrid teams for the modern age

Although our partnership started from humble beginnings, it has morphed into a hybrid team approach where we are one of very few agencies to provide domain experts and team support to the BBC. Having started at just one or two designers in-house, we now supply the BBC with around 20 staff in hybrid roles across a myriad of projects. Those roles span UX and UI designers, frontend and backend developers, full stack engineers, business analysts and project managers. And they all work on very different projects ranging from design and frontend development for the BBC’s Top Gear website to an integrated Java development team and QA tester for Britbox.

Of course, these in-house specialists always have tech support back at base too, with our team at UIC Digital backing up the roles if anything gets blocked. From Javascript to AWS, our people provide microservices across the full development chain, on services like the BBC’s login portal or the video player used across platforms like BBC iPlayer. We also provide testing, manually and automated, writing test cases on an ongoing basis. 

In essence, whenever the Beeb has a tech or a design gap, we fill it. 

It’s true to say we have a special relationship with the BBC, one that has been built on prosperity, trust and hard work. It’s what we specialise in at UIC Digital – creating hybrid solutions for clients that need a long-term partner they can rely on – and an area we so dearly love too. Perhaps, one day, we can do that for you.

What the BBC said:

“No unnecessary politics, demands or prima donnas here, just great developers, UX teams and people who are passionate about delivering amazing customer experiences for your business. I couldn’t recommend them highly enough!”

BBC Senior Manager