11 Teams | 4 Designers | 2 Months

Create and harmonize the design for BBC's digital platforms covering the Nigeria election across West and East Africa. Emphasize a design language that is vibrant and simple to comprehend.

The following 4 sets of elections (Presidential, Senate, House of Representatives, Gubernatorial) were scheduled for 25 February and 11 March 2023 across the 36 states of Nigeria and the Federal capital, Abuja.

Federal Elections for

State elections for

In summary, we had numerous aspects to elucidate and convey information about to our audience – including the candidates in contention, manifestoes, the election locations, and the eventual results. My task was to ensure a coherent, comprehensible, and captivating presentation as we navigated through the pre-election buildup, the election phase itself, and the live coverage of the results.

Leading the West and East African Digital design teams and working closely with the Nigeria and Africa Social media and News teams, I helped to build the design system, UX, and data design across products, providing training to stakeholders, guiding the use of the design system and visual identity for improved consistency and brand equity across all digital touchpoints, implementing the identity across all our digital offerings, and providing creative direction.​​Initial efforts were focused on the following:

A Discovery workshop of the problem space, challenging the brief and deciding focus for maximum product improvement over past elections.

Conducting user research and usability tests on existing internal tools with stakeholders to ensure improved usability and reduced time to complete tasks. I realised a lot of processes involved in their flow could be automated and updated the designs accordingly.

Ideate and design solutions to test with users and learn whether they are successful from a user perspective

Review and evolve the design system and document for the development team to execute

Beyond these, I worked closely with various editorial, engineering, and product teams to prioritize business goals, QA test development efforts, and push for accessibility throughout all aspects of our product rollout; making sure all products were produced in 11 African languages for local audiences as they made the bulk of our users, prioritizing testing for colour blindness, and contrast accessibility across all digital and social media content.

Despite the team's seasoned experience in handling elections, we encountered numerous unforeseen challenges throughout the journey.

Internally, we had reported increased productivity and ease of use over the previous 2019 elections wherein journalists could not seamlessly engage with the internal tools created to output content. On collecting the data though, we cut down the average time to generate real-time election results for social and web pages by 150% on average thanks to the research-based implementation of automation on a series of manual tasks. Making sure that our stakeholders can get news to audiences in almost real-time without compromising on high-quality output.

External/User-facing products had record numbers increasing the daily active users by 364% across the West African language service audiences.