LBCI
Links
www.lbcgroup.tvForward Thinking, By Design
LBCI was Lebanon's first privately owned television station, focused on providing news and entertainment content to the Lebanese diaspora since 1992. As a trendsetter in the Arabic entertainment business through content such as reality shows, LBCI pride themselves on a forward thinking attitude in a region often constrained by religious views and ideals. The station's ideal is to attract a modern and youthful audience that will shape the future.
After being voted as one of the 30 most recognizable brands in the Arab world, it was important for LBCI to reflect this surging popularity with a state-of-the-art digital experience that would let users new and old enjoy content across the station's diverse verticals.
1
The Challenge
Accommodating the Modern User
Reacting to the explosive growth of their mobile readership (66% in 2014), LBCI realized that their site structure and content approach needed to evolve. Partnering with Code and Theory, LBCI saw the value of responsive design that's simple in structure and accessible from anywhere.
LBCI challenged Code and Theory to set the benchmark for future Lebanese digital experiences.
2
The Experience Insight
Own Your Audience
48% of the site's audience is under 29 years old, which presented a clear opportunity to build a site that was more accessible to younger generations. In addition, we dove into site analytics, discovering a split between users visiting for news content (60%) and users visiting for entertainment content (40%). It become clear that youthful audiences needed information and entertainment delivered seamlessly, with plenty of opportunities to share with their peers.
We explored an interaction model that would blend content types, cater to all users, and encourage serendipitous discovery.
3
The Solution
Designed for Multiple Languages
A clear, bold and open design layout was developed, to not only let LBCI's diverse range of content breathe, but to ease translation across English and Arabic without losing or changing the overall structure. The design layout needed to work both left to right (English) and right to left (Arabic), so a great deal of consideration was taken into account when choosing the typeface, page structure, and the general sizing of design elements to ensure legibility.
The sans serif rendering of both English and Arabic typography conveys LBCI’s forward thinking values, with unique design details at modular level building upon this theme. Distinct color systems were developed to map to various content types, guiding the user across the experience.
Bold in its color choice, with an elegant aesthetic, the dynamic structure allows for effortless daily use.
Flexible, Modular Design
An extremely flexible system (especially within the News section) was required to react to breaking stories, allowing the injection of “hero modules” to the top of pages to call out important news stories with constantly updating details. A broad range of easily identifiable modules, from “political collections” to “top headlines,” enabled the news team to construct relevant and exciting homepage layouts, reacting to the various developing stories that any given day can present.
This flexible structure made it vital to update the taxonomy of the website's navigation. We divided content into new categories like entertainment and news, as well as incorporating everyday tools such as traffic, weather and a programming guide. As many components within the design were created to scale and reposition, it was important that the user could identify content types and categories quickly and easily.
Visual Design Challenges
Set against current standards, legacy content presented a challenge for maintaining the quality and consistency that Code and Theory established across the site experience. It was key to help the client understand the details of the design, by pointing out what type of graphics and imagery would work within the design to highlight and promote the various shows and content that LBCI produces. Not only were asset guidelines produced to help demonstrate the type of assets to aspire to in the future and how to produce these, but at each step of the design process, great care was taken to help the client understand the intention of the design.
4
The Results
A Progressive Trendsetter
The reinvigorated digital experience positioned LBCI as the trendsetting, forward-thinking brand they aspire to be. Through this future-proof platform they are now able to share their unrivaled content and communicate their core values in a fresh and dynamic way.
