BBC

All the data and evidence from Playtime showed that the strategy of a single purpose gaming app with multiple games was incredibly successful but making games is expensive, the retention of games can be quite low.

The product team spotted an opportunity to reuse existing HTML5 games within an app wrapper. This would allow us to essentially halve the cost of game production, one game for both the web and app. It also meant the new product could be built to be accessible to users with additional needs.

At the same time as our discovery phase, I was rewriting Games GEL to ensure greater consistency between games. The importance of Games GEL can't be understated, it meant if we brought our games together in one app, users wouldn't experience jarring switches in UI or face having to learn new ways to access the content.

The next challenge was how to deliver new content within the app regularly to our audience. The stats from the CBeebies Storytime app showed how successful the introduction of a download feature aimed at kids had been. The retention stats and overall stickiness had been drastically improved. As a UX team, we'd done an awful lot of hard work to make a download journey simple enough for a three-year-old to use.

Our assumption was that we could reuse the same download pattern in this new app.

As a team we listed our assumptions about this new app and story mapped what we felt would be the minimum viable product to get to market. MVP can often be misunderstood but the most important word is viable, the children's market is competitive, we needed to be viable within that.

With this in mind, I was aware we needed a strong narrative and a set of design principles to hook the whole menu together. We worked closely with editorial to agree on the design principles before ideating on different themes.

We then presented four ideas back to the product team. The overwhelming favourite was for a town narrative therefore each game would be represented by a building. We created lots of prototypes with different interaction methods to test with users whilst simultaneously creating some initial concept art to elicit the feel of the app. Children's prototypes generally need to be much richer to hold their interest.