CBeebies Playtime Island: The game app with no games…
We launched CBeebies Playtime Island in September 2016, the tricky second album following up the successful CBeebies Playtime title already established at the top of the free kids mobile app charts.
We recently released version 2.0 with the intent to increase the frequency at which we could release new games into the app. We believed this was a significant opportunity to better serve our audience’s appetite for games in the app space.
In CBeebies Playtime and Playtime Island, we have traditionally packaged games into each unique app release. This came with significant regression testing and release governance overheads, it was expensive and time consuming and meant we only ever released significant updates once a quarter.
Our CBeebies Storytime app offered the team insights. Specifically, an in-app library feature where users could download interactive stories hosted by the BBC into their Storytime app. We knew that users who adopted the library feature used the app more frequently.
We were confident that in-app game downloads could work well in Playtime Island. So, rather than packaging new games in the app release, we could host them on AWS S3 and our users could download them from the game catalogue in the app.
The product team set about shaping this opportunity and agreed on three guiding assumptions.
Assumption one
New users who install this app will find no games pre-installed in the menu.
We made a choice — no games packaged in the app.
This was very much an opportunity to better streamline the ongoing support and maintenance of an app that would have regular updates of new games over the coming months and years.
We wanted to separate the app (a menu for navigating to games) packaged for app store release, from the content (the games downloaded into the menu from AWS).
It makes a lot of business sense and it reduces the ongoing time and cost overheads of releasing to stores by reducing the complexity of the app release. We still do app releases but they’re not driven by frequent content updates. It also means the initial download from stores is below 100mb, which saves effort on the Google Play platform.
However, we could only gain confidence in this assumption by proving out that we could successfully onboard users into an app with no games.
Assumption two
Existing users would have their pre-installed games taken out of their Playtime Island when they update to version 2.0.
It would require significant development effort to remove and reinstall existing game content given the architecture changes in this release. It would have brought in additional auto-download requirements and further delayed the release of this new feature to our audiences. Instead, existing users would have to visit the game catalogue to find and download their favourite games.
We could only gain confidence in this assumption by proving out that we could successfully onboard existing users without negative feedback.
Assumption three
All users will need a connection to the internet to download a game from the catalogue
The user requiring an internet connection was the easy part — users will undoubtedly open the app on planes, or areas without any kind of network coverage on first app open.
However we looked at usage across previous app versions and found that 97% of users opening the app had connection to the internet. Phew.
Taking risks
We were taking risks — why?
It’s your natural instinct to be uncomfortable with the idea of taking something away from users — in this case their games from the previous release and those users are kids!
It’s rule number one — CBeebies does not upset kids.
We also asked parents what they thought about the BBC taking content away from their children, and they said, DON’T DO IT! Of course they did.
That’s rule number two. CBeebies does not upset parents. They’re our biggest advocates in acquiring our products.
So, let’s take a look at why we thought it was worth pushing those assumptions, and why we believed we could create stronger habitual usage within our app, despite some very justifiable stakeholder and user apprehension. We had to prove the case!
Onboarding, key to forming habits
Our stakeholders fundamentally bought into the view that there is significant value in the games catalogue feature for our audiences, but there were concerns around our assumptions and we needed to build confidence in our approach.
Getting the onboarding process right was key to building confidence and, in designing it, we reviewed what the process could aim to do:
- It could have explained how to use the new games catalogue feature
- It could have shouted about the new games available in the release
- It could have told existing users where to find pre-installed games
- It could have explained why you have eight empty slots in your island
- It could have tried to do all of the above.
However, we decided to do none of the above.
One action mattered most to the product team:
Every single user who opens Playtime Island “downloads” a game on their first experience in the app.
In the CBeebies Storytime app we identified a cohort of users that didn’t adopt the library feature, and as a consequence tended to visit the app less frequently.
This insight reinforced our belief that “downloading” was key to onboarding users, as this was the user behaviour we needed to create for our app to fully deliver its value proposition.
We believed this action would provide us with the best possible opportunity to create a habit-forming behaviour with parents and preschool children from the offset. Only once this habit was established could we justifiably offer our audiences a superior CBeebies follow up title to Playtime.
We tested, tweaked and verified our onboarding journey in lab testing with parents and preschool children. It was simple and intuitive, and with the average UK broadband speed now at 36mb (April-17 Ofcom), we were cautiously optimistic that it wouldn’t be a frustrating first experience in our app.
We also tested kids’ attention span for slow downloads and, as you’d expect, they lose interest. We made the call to have parental message prompts for users on data connections and we recommended they connect to wi-fi for the best possible experience.
Release planning, underpinned by metrics
We had made some decisions that carried risk: you would need internet connection, we would be removing games from existing users and you would need to onboard successfully before you could play a game.
To manage the risk around those decisions, and thanks to the functionality available on Google Play, we pushed an initial release to 25% of Android users for seven days.
We were looking for 90% of users to install a game on first app launch to trigger a full rollout to Google Play, Amazon and iOS. We were also measuring negative sentiment from existing users around their favourite games disappearing from their island.
We fell slightly short, of our target figure — 82.5% of users installed a game on first app launch but we could attribute some of the shortfall to bugs, rather than poor onboarding design, and thus far we’ve had no complaints about removing games from existing users.
We then triggered a full rollout and we released a game app with no games.
Success metrics
At the time of writing this post we have overseen 1.5 million successful game downloads into the app, we’re starting to average 250,000 game downloads per week and an average of four games installed per user.
Compared to previous app versions, users opening version 2.0 on the first day after install has increased by 10%. This is incredibly reassuring for the team given the growth in acquisition from being featured in stores. We can take confidence that we’ve established a habit-forming behaviour that delivers more value to those new users.
CBeebies Playtime established its success on great experiences and releases every quarter. Playtime Island has shifted the dial. Our audiences can expect great experiences featuring more of their favourite characters and brands every month. Our app ratings have matched our established CBeebies products, and Playtime Island became the number one free kids app on iOS for the first time.
From the offset we believed the games catalogue feature would improve our day 28 retention — by increasing the speed we can serve new games to the app we can reduce the churn of users. We’ll be looking at this metric compared to previous app versions to understand the impact on our churn of users.
Being fast is key to increasing the app’s lifetime value. The game app market is a challenging space to build loyalty — there’s so much choice and strong competition. We’re all competing for that icon on the home screen and we hope we’ve established the habit which keeps us there and delights our audience.
