Show your Skills City
SkillCity as an MVP shows rapid product development but aspires to getting kids (and parents!) out playing football — benchmarking against the best
In the 90’s, I remember my parents shouting me across the street near our place over in Warrington. We were always out kicking a ball around, tearing around on bikes or just doing something else particularly active and particularly parent-annoying. Now, we hear stories about kids spending more time in front of consoles than being outside.

That being said, I’m a huge fan of spending time with consoles and anything else that encourages digital engagement, but I’d much rather find that happy medium. We’ve been kicking this concept over since I joined the club and with the US Tour we spotted an opportunity to try something. We want to encourage kids to get outside to play football and we want to encourage some parent or family/kid time while we’re at it.
Working with our colleagues in Football and Marketing, we’ve been able to take all of that thinking and — in only nine weeks — turn around a prototype app that lets everyone take on the best in the world. OK, it’s aimed at kids, but seriously — we beat Raheem when we tried the challenges…. (My eyes are on a first team appearance now.)
SkillCity is the output of all of this. We took some brave decisions here and (hopefully!) we can explain some of that below.
The app itself is fairly simple; watch some videos, recreate the challenges and get a score. If you do well, and you’re in the US, submit them to the competition and you might win a trip to Manchester, via finals in California. It’s the US tour after all….
How to annoy product people — go rogue with brand
Despite what it might look like, SkillCity does try to remain ‘on brand’. As you may have read in other posts, we’re trying to consolidate apps and our brand across the wider digital estate. So how does SkillCity sit within this?
First off, it’s a prototype so we can do what we want…. said no-one ever. Whilst it is a bit of an experiment that was put together in a very ambitious time frame, we’ve tried to make it consistent with the new design characteristics being tabled for the new Kids app. Designing for kids is obviously very different and the (very!) wide target ages of 5–14 for SkillCity meant that we had to think creatively around some pretty massive design challenges. Very few apps can cater for that range without providing a number of instances, like the excellent BBC iPlayer Kids app. We just don’ t have the time or resource for this.
However, what this does mean is that it introduces a new visual treatment into the estate and something fairly noticeable in the app store when you look at our product offerings. This has obviously resulted in number of grovelling conversations with our Mobile Product Manager — sorry Matt.

Augmented What?
We’re not fans of just repacking other concepts and if you follow much of the digital press, you’ll have seen we’re known for pushing what a football club can do, traditionally. Ideas and concepts get widely discussed on a regular basis and we’d had some conversations with our friends at Rhythm around augmented reality which gave us some ideas that we’d like to try.
From here, we wrote the stories for this product in conjunction with our Football Marketing colleagues and wanted to try something bold, tapping in to AR functionality when it comes to laying out the challenges. Overlaying cones (or jumpers) was the obvious one. We quickly ran into depth-of-field issues and the need to do the process twice to get breadth and depth. That was a no-go. We eventually ended up with the “Setup Check”, which looks at where you’ve laid out your cones (or jumpers) and have it register them. Also tricky it turned out. Without using markers that you’d have to print, this was going to be tough.
What we ended up with is a stripped back version where you manually confirm where a cone (or jumper) is. It’s not so much AR than some clever maths that lets us check that the challenge is laid out correctly — but we still need to ask for the height of the person holding the camera. Apparently even maths (and cameras) have their limits.
We also tested this with multiple groups of kids who pretty much just skipped the AR element, so we dialled it way back. I’m sure we’ll find a use for it eventually though…
Building for Kids
I’ve lost count of the number of privacy conversations I’ve had around this product. Maintaining the privacy of our younger fans is categorically the most important thing when it comes to handling data. We want to do the right thing here and were painfully aware that we were handling images of kids. As such, we’ve done;
- Email verification of parents; a parent should ideally be the one setting up the account on SkillCity and we’ll confirm this action by email
- Presented a maths check ‘gate’
- Added robust audit capabilities
- Deleting content from devices and servers after a period of time
- And — critically — we are putting video review and submission into the hands of parents. Videos will only be submitted when parents confirm the action. We’ll provide notifications and reminders to do this
We are very aware of both COPPA and GDPR and are working towards compliance wherever we can.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that we know that kids are unlikely to have access to the latest device; we know that they generally ‘inherit’ tech passed down from parents so we opted to build for iPhone 5 and above and Android 4.4 KitKat. This was also a big challenge in terms of what we wanted the, now ageing, phones to do. That said, I’ve been testing the app on a creaky old iPad 2 and it’s handling it just fine, unlike most other apps that bring it to its knees!
Next steps
This one is very much not-job-done. We still have a lot of items to clear from the backlog — the big one being getting all of the Android flavours out as quickly as possible. This should happen over the next couple of days and we’ll update this post plus all of the digital assets when we do. We picked up a couple of delays towards the back-end of the build which meant that the ‘droid and iOS teams were out of sync. Rather than delay the delivery, we opted to push iOS and try to make up some time by targeting the most popular Android devices initially.
We’re looking forward to seeing how this app performs and learning from it. You’re able to download the app via mancity.com/skillcity and as always, leave comments below or get in touch with the Digital team via Twitter.


