BBC - Playtime Island

Playtime Island is a top 10 ranking kids app with games from some of the BBC’s most beloved characters. The corporation wanted to refresh this flagship children’s app, give it the TLC it deserved, but also make it easier and more cost effective to maintain and add new features.

We made some difficult but sound technical and design choices to this end, focussing on modularity, reusability, and off-the-shelf technology, allowing the BBC not only to refresh Playtime Island, but all four of their top childrens apps with a much smaller team.

You can get Playtime Island free on iOS, Android or Kindle

Playtime Island gave me the chance to work on a larger-scale multi-tenant monorepo, and the opportunity to dig into the core of Capacitor for building universal web/native apps. It was also an eye-opening first experience of running UX testing & refinement sessions with kids as well as their parents.

Images copyright BBC, 2021