麻豆约拍

Today we鈥檙e announcing 麻豆约拍 iWonder,聽a bold new brand whose mission is to unlock the learning potential of all 麻豆约拍 content.

We know that people's curiosity is often sparked by聽麻豆约拍 programmes,聽and聽also by the world around them. 麻豆约拍 iWonder is for these curious minds, and at its' heart is a new content format, interactive guides. Guides聽will invite people to lean forward, and actively explore a range of factual and education topics from Science聽and Natural History, Arts, History, Religion and Ethics, Food and more. In this blog post, I鈥檒l outline the features of iWonder interactive guides, as well as what to expect from聽this new format聽in the near future.

A new way to tell stories on the web

Interactive guides take a different approach to presenting content聽compared to聽traditional web articles or TV and radio programmes online. They organise video and audio, rich infographics, written summaries, and activities into stories that make the most of our interactive medium. We know from plenty of research that people learn better by doing, and we鈥檝e designed our guides to be 鈥渟it forward,鈥� placing聽a user鈥檚 interactions with the content at the core of the experience. Interactive guides take the audience through a series of steps that ask them to look at multiple perspectives of intriguing questions, always with the chance to reflect on the significance of the story at the end.

The initial set of interactive guides mark the start of the on the 麻豆约拍 and are聽presented by experts including , Kate Adie, Ian McMillan and Neil Oliver. For more on these read Executive Producer Tim Plyming鈥檚

A multi-screen modern media landscape

More and more of our audiences are accessing our content via mobile and tablet devices. In fact, for the first time this past Christmas, the proportion of people visiting the from a tablet or smartphone was larger than those visiting from a PC. This trend is set to continue. With the look and feel of 鈥渘ative mobile applications鈥� getting ever more immersive, our audience鈥檚 expectations of accessing content on their phones and tablets is high. Expecting our users to struggle to navigate a full 鈥渄esktop鈥� website on a tiny screen isn鈥檛 acceptable any longer.

We all instinctively know that learning is not something that happens at a single time or place only, sitting quietly at a desk or with a PC. Our guides display聽beautifully no matter聽what screen size聽you view them on, accompanying you as you move through your life - at school, home or work, while you're on the go, or while you wait for something else to happen.

To achieve this, our team has employed from our first lines of code. With responsive web design, the devil is in the detail. On mobile especially, response times are absolutely crucial. If a web page takes longer than a couple of seconds to load, you鈥檝e already lost a huge percentage of potential browsers. To keep response times down to a minimum, we鈥檝e had to develop a system that loads in just the essential components of the page at the right times. Mobile-sized images download first, then when the page鈥檚 Javascript detects the browser鈥檚 capabilities, higher-resolution images get 鈥榣oaded in dynamically.鈥� This can mean the difference of up to a mega-byte鈥檚 worth of content for a browser to download. At that , a mobile browser can become agonisingly slow.

For pictures with a dense amount of information on them, such as , it鈥檚 important not just to resize a smaller version of a big image, but to load in a completely different image that鈥檚 best for that screen. Usually this means a more 鈥渮oomed in鈥� view right for mobile. Our system elegantly handles all this image swapping without the user ever noticing. Try reducing the聽width of your browser window to see it in action聽

We鈥檝e strived for this 鈥榠nvisible鈥� elegance in other places too. For instance, we load in the correct media player for any device behind the scenes, so that visitors on an iPhone don鈥檛 get served a Flash player, which won鈥檛 work on their Apple device. In this way, everyone should get exactly the same high-quality experience, all the time.

The 麻豆约拍 also has a firm commitment to both web accessibilityand backwards compatibility, making our experiences just as pleasing on older browsers such as Internet Explorer 8 as on newer, more capable web browsers. We鈥檝e taken care to ensure that for users with Javascript turned off, or for those using screen readers, all the content is both available and understandable.

Being able to repeatedly produce immersive experiences

Over the past year or so, many highly engaging web experiences have delighted web audiences, such as the . When our development team first set out to imagine what our interactive guides experience should be, we looked at those examples with a degree of envy. But we also noticed that most seemed to be 鈥渙ne-offs鈥� and didn't work well on mobile devices. We were adamant that we wanted our new format to have all the qualities of this class of highly immersive story - but tailored for every device - whilst being straightforward for our editorial teams to reproduce quickly and repeatedly.

Those were the three聽main principles which guided our development, and are the reason the iWonder interactive guides represent such a giant leap forward in the 麻豆约拍's ability to inspire and support learning. Our editorial colleagues now have a toolkit that lets them to put together and publish these rich stories in hours or days, rather than the weeks that it might have taken just a year or so ago. And whereas in the past, each rich story experience would require its own bespoke code and design, there's now just one codebase to maintain and add features to.

In the coming months, we鈥檙e adding a collection of activities that will sit within the guide format's sequence of 鈥榮teps鈥�. Look out for visual quizzes,聽clickable infographics, and plenty of other digital toys to play with, as the library of options available to our production team grows.

I'd love you to know what聽you think, so please do leave a comment.

Andy Pipes is Executive Product Manager, Knowledge and Learning