Designing Flexible Storytelling:
Components for Rich, Multimedia Narratives.

Designing Flexible
Storytelling:
Components for Rich, Multimedia Narratives.

The BBC News Visual Journalism team sought to deliver, richer, immersive storytelling but lacked a scalable
self-service CMS. Long-form articles required resource-heavy bespoke builds, while third-party tools were limited in scalability, portability, and accessibility.

The BBC News Visual Journalism team sought to deliver, richer, immersive storytelling but lacked a scalable self-service CMS. Long-form articles required resource-heavy bespoke builds, while third-party tools were limited in scalability, portability, and accessibility.

Objectives

The challenge was to create engaging, immersive content that reduced production time without compromising accessibility or site performance. Where editorial teams can self-publish. To start to include richer analytics to understand and learn from our readers.

View article here →

Mobile Screens showing US Election Long Form Article
Mobile Screens showing US Election Long Form Article
Mobile Screens showing US Election Long Form Article

Methodology

The organisation lacked familiarity with product thinking, making it challenging to shift editorial teams toward a more efficient, collaborative workflow. Instead of responding to a rigid ‘shopping list’ from stakeholders, I worked to design components that met existing needs while aligning with product workflows.

The idea of the new components was to be:
• Reusable across Visual Journalism articles
• Scalable (variants of components could be used for sub brands and different content themes)
• Trackable (Data analytics)
• Accessible (W3C Compliant)

Through extensive discussions with editorial, engineering, and product teams, I developed an MVP suite of accessible, responsive components for immersive storytelling. While largely self-service, the initial launch was planned as a guided experience.

The organisation lacked familiarity with product thinking, making it challenging to shift editorial teams toward a more efficient, collaborative workflow. Instead of responding to a rigid ‘shopping list’ from stakeholders, I worked to design components that met existing needs while aligning with product workflows.

The idea of the new components was to be:
• Reusable (slot alongside other components in article layouts)
• Scalable (variants of components could be used for sub brands and different content themes)
• Trackable (Data analytics)
• Accessible (W3C Compliant)

The Maiden Voyage

We used our first set of components for an article launched for the US Election 2024. 
Developers had built a really basic CMS (I refer to it as a ‘proto CMS’) which involves the editors to enter content into a Google sheet that had a drop down listing the various components they could use. I created a set of guard rails, and accompanying documentation to help.
This was a great test to see how our system worked.

It just wasn’t really self-service just yet. 

View article here →

Retro

This team was a first of many things for BBC News.

A squad made up of journalists, developers and designers. Something taken for granted in larger product focussed organisations. As news happens in real time, content decay happens really fast. Subsequently, the MVP of this experience had to be shipped very quickly. The project was shipped in 10 days.

Also fast pace news requires constant change and this was a big challenge for developers as well as designers to be so reactive. Hence, the need for a self-publishing tool that didn’t rely on this. As challenging as this particular project was, It was validation of how much we need this tool and lessons learned for version 2.

⇤

© 2024–2025
All Rights Reserved
Selected Works
→ BBC News
IKEA
Christie's International
Condé Nast
Farfetch
About
Linked In