UKTV Style

UKTV Style was a digital channel with a broad remit, from lifestyle and fashion to homes and gardens. They were planning to launch a new channel called UKTV Home, with a flagship programme titled ‘Love the Place You’re In’. 

The timing of this launch coincided with a slowdown in the UK housing market, which meant more people were staying where they were rather than moving on. This new channel and programme would celebrate that and seek to inspire people to make the most of their homes. 

UKTV approached us to develop the strategy and thinking behind a new web platform that would allow them to bring together community and programming in a new way. They wanted to combine user-generated content with their own within a highly engaging and socially rich site. The deliverable would be a vision for this new platform, complete with service description, designs and data structure.

Our approach

We looked at the activities that take place after people watch home improvement shows – the inspiration, the planning, the doing, the pride in workmanship and sharing of photos and DIY war stories – and recognised this as a life cycle. There was potential for two kinds of engagement here: these real-people stories could be shared online, and they could be fed back into television programming. 

Our strategy had to support this life cycle and facilitate movement through it and conversation around it. We used sketch prototypes to test platform ideas with real users, and we refined a set of service principles to illustrate how the platform would work. 

We built a highly social, participatory home decoration site that brought together community and programming, and encouraged users to share content around their own home improvement projects

The final design step was to create a series of high-fidelity designs and a metadata schema that collected ideas and objects around different themes and styles, as a radical new vision for the site that went far beyond programme support. 

How it all went

Our client shared our vision with the rest of their business and got the buy-in necessary to develop the platform. We had laid the groundwork for UKTV’s own internal development team to take the project forward themselves, and UKTV Style launched in late 2007.