Pattrn saw an opportunity to create something outstanding from the education apps currently available on the App Store. Our challenge was to build a trusted early learning platform – aligned to the UK’s numeracy curriculum – that deeply understood children’s abilities, supported their progress and entertained them through their development.
Our first release gained significant interest and positive feedback from parents and kids. Within a month of release we had been featured on the App Store and saw some really positive engagement and repeat use metrics which validated our initial concept. We’ll continue to develop the idea in the not too distant future.
This was only a small fraction of the experience that we wanted to release. Seeing how the store reacted, we are confident to explore the idea further.
“This is a really lovely game which my kids adore and keeps them occupied for 10 minutes every day. The mechanic is simple but you can see how it’s helping them learn. The different scenes are very cool. Can’t wait for them to add more games!”
Before jumping in, we wanted to understand what the benchmark experiences felt like in order to differentiate ourselves and build on the learnings from our peers.
We knew that designing for kids can be difficult. Speaking with teachers was the sensible place to start to understand and gather any insights that would help us to design our app.
We started by first understanding the best way to teach kids from three to five. We then worked out a versatile learning journey that could adapt to the learning pace for each individual.
Working closely with teachers and kids we soon realised that our biggest obstacle would be capturing the kids attention. Kids learn through play and role playing. We started by prototyping the interactions and quickly testing and iterating our interactions until we could capture the kids attention.
We knew the best way to test the idea with the market was to make something before we committed to creating the full platform.
In order to capture the kids' attention we knew we had to create a playful and safe world that was fun to interact with and would encourage users to explore.
We understood from our research that there are some general archetypes we could relate to. We created characters that we hoped our users would be able to relate to. These characters gave us an opportunity for the platform to be personalised in the future.
We learnt very early on that the app needed to be fun first and over time the game becomes educational. You can’t force kids to learn, they learn by playing. We included screens that helped parents understand how the app works and benefits it has for their child’s education.
We spent time crafting the animation of the characters to bring them to life. We included delightful animations and sounds at key moments to reward users when they got something right. We chose the playful music very carefully to be fun for the kids and not to annoy their parents.
A key part for the success of the app was to be able to monetise it. We created in-app purchases where the users could unlock more scenes and more of their favourite characters to test if we could achieve our goal.
This was only a small fraction of the experience that we wanted to release. Seeing how the store reacted, we are confident to explore the idea further.
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