#ux&d

BBC Design Sprint / iPlayer for Babies

We ran a one day design sprint as part of our induction in the BBC. We were in groups of three and our aim was to design iPlayer for babies. It was a really interesting brief and we really had to focus on our audience.

We started out thinking about what babies can achieve, and what their needs are. Our team focused on keeping their attention, and making them aware of movements. We also thought about the parents need to be with the baby at all times, we thought about how the app could give the parents a chance to have some more free time whilst entertaining the baby in an educative way.

We came up with some main focus points, such as sounds, colours, textures, reactiveness. With these points in mind we came up with a few ‘How Might We …’ sentences. Such as; how might we use physical objects (toys etc) to interact with iPlayer? How might we create a hand free interactive experience? How might we exploit AR to bring iPlayer content into the real world? How might we create a shared experience through parent and child? How might we create a response through engagement with sounds? How might we provide a visual response to babies sounds? How might we entertain babies using textures?

These helped us focus our idea again, and we then agreed on the values we wanted the product to include: Shared Experience, Engagement and Interaction. We then did a timed exercise where we had a 8 minutes to come up with 8 ideas for how the final thing would work. After discussion of all of our quick ideas, we decided on a concept.

The concept was to be based around a moveable patch that would be attached to a baby toy, such as a rattle. This would then link up to a device such as TV or iPad. As the baby moved the rattle, the objects or characters on the page would move around. The idea would be that the baby could detect the difference in visuals depending on how much it moved the rattle.

We thought about this patch being something transferable, that would last until the child grew up and it could be implemented within a new interactive product and more engaging visuals.