Early user testing helped us to define a playful and educational game
Berry’s Adventures
Inspiring the next generation of kids through smart, meaningful & engaging games
Education
3 months
Overview
Activities
- Ethnographic research
- Customer journey mapping
- Landscape audit and benchmarking
- Insights synthesis and opportunity analysis
- Experience definition
- Vision definition & rapid prototyping
- UX, UI and experience design
- Product management
- User testing
- Design quality assurance
- Native iOS app development
- Illustration and animation
- Icons, typography and art direction
Introduction
Pattrn saw an opportunity to elevate the standard of educational apps on the App Store. With our first release, we introduced a fun and engaging learning experience that resonated with both kids and parents.
Within a month, the app was featured on the App Store, receiving strong engagement and repeat use, validating our concept. This successful proof of concept marks just the beginning - we are confident to explore the idea further.
Challenges
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.
The game needed to be engaging first, with education woven in naturally
Approach
Researched the competitor landscape to identify opportunities
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.
Spoke with teachers to understand the best ways to teach 3 to 5 year olds to learn
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.
Mapping the Early Learning Curriculum helped us create a platform roadmap aligned with how kids learn
Building a flexible early learning experience
We mapped out the UK Early Learning Guide to create a structured yet adaptable curriculum for children aged three to five. By focusing on individual learning paces, we designed a versatile journey that supports each child's development through play-based learning.
Engaging kids through play and testing the market
Working closely with teachers and children, we refined game interactions to capture attention through role-playing and interactive experiences. Rapid prototyping and iteration helped us perfect engagement. To validate our approach, we launched an initial game, testing product-market fit before committing to the full platform.
Solutions
Safe natural brand world that kids would feel safe to learn in
A brand new world to inspire the imagination
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.
Characters designed for archetypes like the leader, creative, adventurer, maker, technologist and alternative
Created characters that kids can relate to
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.
Learning through play. The app was entertaining first, then educational
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 hired a sound designer and created playful animations to bring the game and characters to life
We involved all of the senses
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.
Our in app purchase was a key metric to measure if parents were willing to commit to our game
In-app purchases to expand the experience
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.
Summary
Our work with Berry’s Adventures transformed the way young children interact with educational content through engaging, play-based learning. By blending fun and education, we created a trusted platform that resonated with both kids and parents. The app’s strong early engagement and successful proof of concept have paved the way for further development and expansion.
Project impact
“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!”
