My quibbles with the BBC news website
😡
16th November 2014
I go to BBC news at irregular intervals, sometimes 3 days since last time, sometimes 10 days. Now obviously when I go there I want to find out the most important stuff that's happened since I last went there.
But it just shows me today's news... So something extremely important could have happened a couple of days ago and I wouldn't even know about it.
This is stupid. The whole point of computers is that they're supposed to be interactive and helpful.
Furthermore there should be a way to customise my home-page to show me categories of stuff I'm most interested in (without having to manually click through all the pages at the top).
Here I outline a design that I think would do the job.
- It remembers the last time I went there, using a cookie. It's already possible to make a BBC account so this will not be difficult.
- Each article should have an "importance" rank, applied by the author. So for example "cure for cancer discovered" might have a rank of 10 and "Patients struggling to book with GP" 3.
- The user should be able to specify their own importance rank for different categories of news. I might choose like this: Science: 9, Technology: 8, Health: 8, Politics: 5, Business: 5, Celebrities: 1, Terrorism: 1
- Each article's important rank is multiplied by the user's category importance rank to produce a final importance rank for that article for that user.
- When I visit BBC news, the final importance rank is calculated for every article that was written since I last went there. Then those articles with the highest rank are displayed on the homepage, sorted from top to bottom.
So I call upon the BBC to please update their eighteen-hundreds-style website to provide us with a 21st century experience. Thankyou.