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BBC Sounds - Sign in & Registration

Creating variants for user testing

We started this project by finding out how users might respond to the idea of signing in. We came up with variants of the journey to let the user know they now needed to sign in to listen. 

We wanted to know if they’d prefer to sign in strait away, or if they’d prefer to browse the site before signing in. We also wanted to find out how they’d respond to upfront messaging.

BBC Mandatory Sign in Concepts

Prototypes & user testing

We created prototypes for the different variants and then took them to two rounds of user testing.

User Testing Mandatory Sign in

Results of the user testing

I look back on these designs and realise how far I've grown since 2015 when I was learning how to run user research. Back then we thought it was acceptable to give quantifiable numbers to the results of the study. I learnt since that it's important to differentiate qual from qaunt in your results. Read more about my research process.


After the user testing we concluded that users liked the journey where the modal appered once the user had clicked play on the content. This was the least disruptive and allowed the user to make the decision to sign in once they were commited to consuming the content.

Having the modal come up earlier in the journey felt too disruptive. The banner option wasn't obvious enough and users missed it. Having a full page take over was too much, users felt lost and didn't know that they were at the radio page they had clicked on and were used to seeing.

User Testing results for mandatory sign in
User Testing results for mandatory sign in

Entry points and User journey mapping

Once we were clearer about what journey the users preferred I put together user journey maps for the developers. These were to show where and how Mandatory Sign In will need to be triggered across the site.

Journey mapping mandatory sign in
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