Storytelling in Design

Chapter 12. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Stories and Modular Design

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Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Stories and Modular Design

One Page for Every Athlete

In 2011 I was working with a very talented team at my most memorable project to that point, the BBC London 2012 Olympics website. Our job was to work with the rest of the BBC Olympics team and create one page for every athlete, every sport, every country, and every venue, and then of course there were the results and the schedules. It was a massive project with a very hard deadline. I was part of the team that worked on the country, venues, and athlete pages.

The athlete pages in particular formed a challenge in terms of making sure they’d work for every single athlete. The template we defined for athletes had to work for the likes of Usain Bolt, who has participated and won medals in previous Olympic Games, and was likely to win medals in the London Olympics too. News stories were written about him frequently, and he was mentioned in other stories about his country and the events he was competing in. On the other end of the spectrum, we had athletes who’d never come close to winning a medal, and who most likely wouldn’t win any during the London Olympics either. Some of them came from countries with so few athletes that there may not be a single news story about them or their country. These were just some of the complexities we were working with.

When we started working on the BBC Olympics project, the redesign of BBC Sport ...