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BBC Good Food
ShareBBC Good Food cross-platform mobile app
BBC Good Food is the biggest food brand in Europe with millions of users accessing its extensive collection of over 10,000 curated recipes every month. From classic British fare, Asian inspired dishes and American favourites through to creative vegetarian meals, Halloween cakes or even royal wedding themed menus, BBC Good Food has something for everyone.
We partnered with the BBC team to reimagine the entire BBC Good Food mobile app experience. The result is a deliciously useful and compulsively usable gateway to a whole new world of foodie delights!
Previous Good Food apps had been built around the in-app purchases of cookbooks or collections of recipes. With the advent of the responsive web, this model no longer offered a differentiated app experience and a new approach was required.
The new BBC Good Food app was reimagined as a full extension of the website. It provided full access to the 10,000 strong recipe collection, with deep integration into the shared My Good Food membership system through a custom API we helped design. This shared login allows users to start saving and organising recipes on one device, and resume on another.
Users can also rate recipes and submit their own recipes for consideration by the Good Food team.
A truly cross-platform approach was required. The new app needed to deliver a universal experience across all mobile platforms, both phone and tablet, within a tight budget and an even tighter timeframe – the pending release of iOS11 meant that the previous versions of the Good Food app would no longer work.
We selected the Xamarin mobile development framework – recently acquired by Microsoft - which allowed us to leverage centralised shared code across the iOS, Android and Windows platforms. Our teams could then focus on crafting the native user experience on each platform.
This latest project for BBC is our most extensive yet and we are extremely proud of the end result.
A flexible, scalable architecture
A simplified yet flexible information architecture was created, closely aligned with the website data structures, in order to present and manage the extensive recipe catalogue.
A human centered process
Throughout the project, we were constantly validating our assumptions through internal & external user testing, often rapidly iterating paper prototypes for quick feedback. This focus on the user extended into the final stages of the development process.
Multi Platform, Common Architecture
Through leveraging the Xamarin mobile development framework, we were able to achieve significant code reuse across iOS, Android and Windows through a shared C# codebase, thereby reducing development costs, streamlining delivery and allowing our teams to focus on crafting the native user experience across all platforms.
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The new BBC Good Food app needed to not only work across platforms, but it needed to scale across all form factors from the iPhone to the iPhone Plus, the iPad Mini to the iPad Pro, all the way through to the Galaxy S8 and Google Pixel.
Global recognition
The BBC Good Food app project was identified by Microsoft as a global hero project & featured in the Keynote presentation at the Microsoft Connect 2017 event in New York by the legendary Scott Guthrie, EVP Cloud and Enterprise - alongside Vimeo, UPS and Quora!
Head of Partnerships, UK Publishing“We partnered with NV Interactive in the creation of the BBC My Good Food App. This was truly a collaborative project, across our respective Product, Design and Developmental teams. We’re proud of what has been accomplished and the recognition our app has garnered. It’s a real testament to the quality of NV’s work and the consultative way in which they have approached the build.”
