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Overview  |  Discovery & team  |  UX & design  |  CMS  |  Data  |  Advertising & subscriptions  |  Results

Overview

BBC.com serves audiences outside the UK with global news, analysis, video, audio and specialist content across areas including business, culture, travel and innovation. It also operates as a commercial product. The platform must support the BBC’s editorial standards while creating sustainable revenue from advertising, sponsorship and subscriptions.

When UIC joined the programme in 2021, the international digital estate had grown across different products, publishing systems and content teams. Users could encounter inconsistent navigation, branding and page structures, while editors had to work across separate tools and processes. Data, advertising and account capabilities also needed to work more consistently across the website and mobile apps.

The brief was not simply to reskin BBC.com. It required a new product experience, a shared design system, a highly customised editorial platform, new web and app technology, and an integration layer connecting BBC services with external commercial systems. The work also had to be delivered while the BBC continued publishing around the clock.

The reworked BBC.com experience first launched in North America in December 2023. The website and new BBC app then rolled out to further international markets during 2024, followed by paid subscriptions in the US in 2025. UIC continues to work with the BBC today, operating as an extension of its product and technology teams as the platform develops.

Discovery built around the real publishing operation

UIC began with a three-month discovery phase involving 15 workshops and around 50 stakeholders. The work covered editorial operations, audience needs, content flows, advertising, data, identity, platform architecture and delivery constraints. It created a common view of how the existing estate worked and which problems had to be solved first.

The analysis was deliberately detailed. More than 300 current-state observations were gathered across BBC teams and publishing tools, then translated into 175 high-level future requirements. These covered routine editorial tasks as well as demanding situations such as breaking news, scheduled publishing, content withdrawal, regional rights, live coverage, sponsorship and changes to commercial rules.

Six months of international audience research ran alongside the operational and technical discovery. Concepts and prototypes were tested, reviewed and refined before being committed to development. This allowed the team to test information architecture, navigation, content presentation and commercial journeys with users rather than relying on internal assumptions.

More than 250 BBC stakeholders were involved over the course of the programme. UIC assembled a team of 37 people across product, research, UX, visual design, business analysis, architecture, backend and frontend engineering, mobile development, CMS engineering, QA, DevOps and programme delivery. UIC and BBC worked as one team, using shared planning, daily communication, fortnightly reviews and regular demonstrations to keep editorial, commercial and technical decisions aligned.

A clearer experience for reading, watching and listening

The UX work started with the way audiences find and consume content. Previously, related material could sit in different parts of the site because it came from different BBC teams or systems. The new information architecture organised the experience around audience interests, making it easier to move between articles, short and long-form video, live output and audio without needing to understand the BBC’s internal structure.

UIC created a shared design system based on the BBC’s established design and accessibility principles. It contains more than 1,200 components, variants and states covering navigation, content cards, article layouts, media players, live coverage, account journeys, advertising and subscription experiences. The system was designed in Figma and connected to the component library used by engineers, reducing the gap between design decisions and production code.

The component approach provides consistency without forcing every page to look the same. Editors can choose layouts appropriate to a developing news story, a feature, a video collection or a sponsored package, while typography, spacing, interaction and accessibility remain controlled. Components respond to their available space, allowing the same content and design logic to work across web and mobile.

Design and engineering progressed in two-week cycles. Prototypes were used to resolve questions early, and completed work was reviewed with BBC stakeholders throughout delivery. This was especially important for high-traffic journeys such as the homepage, article pages, live news, search, registration and account management, where relatively small decisions can affect millions of visits.

A CMS designed for a 24-hour global newsroom

The editorial platform is built on WordPress and Gutenberg, but its role goes far beyond a conventional website CMS. BBC teams continue to create core articles, audio and video in specialist production systems. The new platform ingests that content and its metadata, then gives international editors the tools to enhance, organise and publish it for BBC.com and the BBC app.

Editors can build pages from controlled components and grids, create reusable templates, curate collections and change navigation without asking a development team to produce a new layout. Responsive previews show how work will appear at different screen sizes before publication, and shareable previews make review and approval easier across distributed teams.

The system supports role-based permissions, editorial workflows, audit trails, scheduled publishing and unpublishing, and immediate content withdrawal. Editors can apply market-specific headlines, summaries, imagery and page treatments while preserving the underlying source content. Rights and geographic controls help ensure that material is only offered where it can legally be used.

Commercial controls are part of the same operating environment. Teams can manage advertising positions, sponsored treatments and page templates with or without advertising. This gives the BBC more control over how editorial and commercial requirements coexist, including the ability to respond quickly when a major news event requires advertising to be reduced or removed.

Connecting content, audience data and commercial decisions

A consistent front end and CMS created the conditions for a more useful data layer. Interactions with articles, live pages, search, audio and video can be captured in a common way, including signals such as return frequency, scroll depth, video completion and abandonment. Anonymous behaviour can later be connected to a BBC account when a user registers or subscribes, subject to consent and privacy controls.

This connected view supports several practical decisions. Product teams can see where journeys succeed or fail. Editors can understand how different formats and topics perform. Commercial teams can improve targeting, segmentation and attribution. The same signals can help determine when it is more appropriate to show advertising, invite registration or present a subscription offer.

The architecture was designed to connect rather than replace every system around it. APIs and integration services bring together BBC content feeds, account and identity services, search, analytics, advertising and commercial platforms. This allows individual services to change over time without requiring the entire product to be rebuilt.

Advertising and subscriptions in one product model

Advertising was treated as a core product requirement from discovery onwards. The platform supports display and native formats, video and audio advertising, direct sponsorship and branded content. Placement rules are built into the page and component system, so commercial inventory can be introduced without creating separate experiences that undermine usability or editorial presentation.

The advertising implementation also supports market differences, user access levels, targeting, segmentation, campaign measurement and rapid changes to units or positions. Editorial and commercial teams have clear controls, including the ability to suppress advertising where the context demands it.

In 2025, the same platform was extended to support paid subscriptions in the US. BBC Studios owned the commercial proposition and subscription strategy. UIC designed and implemented the product journeys and integration layer needed to make that strategy work across BBC.com, BBC Account and the surrounding commercial services.

The subscription solution connects Piano’s paywall and subscription technology with BBC Account, Braintree for payments, Avalara for tax handling and Zendesk for customer support. UIC designed the experience from promotion and offer pages through registration, checkout, access control, account management and cancellation. Error states and hand-offs between systems were treated as part of one customer journey rather than separate vendor implementations.

The paywall is dynamic rather than a fixed barrier applied to every visitor. Engagement and propensity signals allow offers to vary according to a user’s relationship with the site, while casual readers can continue to access content. This creates a practical balance between audience reach, advertising value and subscription conversion. At launch, subscriptions were offered at $8.99 per month or $49.99 per year.

Measured outcomes

BBC.com now operates as a connected international product rather than a set of loosely related digital destinations. It gives audiences a consistent way to read, watch and listen; gives editors direct control over global presentation and commercial layouts; and gives product teams a platform that can support new services without starting again.

The platform reaches 165 million monthly visitors and is the world’s most visited news website. It recorded nine consecutive months of double-digit audience growth, with 23 million weekly website visitors and more than 3 million weekly app visitors.

Performance remained strong after subscriptions were introduced. In September 2025, BBC traffic in the US increased by 27% month on month and 19% year on year to 118.6 million visits, despite the introduction of the dynamic paywall. This is an important measure of the platform’s commercial design: a paid proposition was added without stopping audience growth.

The work was recognised in the UX category at the 2024 BIMA Awards. More importantly, it established an operating platform that the BBC and UIC continue to develop. The current team is working on further product improvements, using the same shared design, data and integration foundations rather than treating each new requirement as a separate project.

The feedback so far has been more than positive. As the BBC said:

“I’m proud of all of it, but the thing I consider a big accomplishment is something our website users will never see: it’s the way we’ve managed to evolve and reinvent our internal processes and structures that allowed us to build this new product. It’s actually more than just a website product launch.

“This is really a reimagining of the BBC experience as a whole for our presence outside the UK, and accomplishing that has meant bringing in new capabilities, new skill sets and experiences, and new ways of working across the organisation. Throughout this shift, our teams have been fantastic – they’ve been collaborative, flexible, motivated creative thinkers (and when I say “our teams”, I consider UIC Digital to be part of that).”

“Transformational” Timothy Douglas Davie CBE, Director General

Watch our UX Director Sam Drury and BBC Studios Creative Director Laura Llewellyn talk about some of the details of the design process at Figma’s 2024 Config conference: