Biba Playground Games

A Suite of Games to Encourage Outdoor Physical Activity for Kids

Project Challenge: To create a mobile experience for families that incentivizes increased usage of playground by children.

Project User: For uptake, targeting parents who want to positively enhance their children’s outdoor physicality. For usage benefits, targeting children ages 3-9, motivating them to engage with outdoor playground play through the enticement of screen-based rewards.

Project Role: I was the Lead Product Designer on this project. This included research, design, prototyping, partner/stakeholder management and project management of development.

The Challenge: The challenge here was to create a mobile app that would get kids back out to playgrounds and getting more physically active in the face of increasing sedentariness among today’s youth. As research has shown, only 14% of kids aged 5-11 are getting the recommended daily amount of moderate to vigorous physical activity of 60 minutes per day and screen-time has been on the increase as well. We partnered with a playground company to create a mobile, screen-based solution that could leverage the screen literacy of today’s kids in solving this outdoor activity dilemma through a mixture of extrinsic onboarding with intrinsic motivational design.

The Discovery: Our partner in this challenge was a large playground manufacturer. Discovery commenced with this partner, and while they were open to embracing any number of design configurations for this solution, they had some parameters to contribute. Their concerns largely applied to the use-case of their product, which they wanted to ensure covered the following:

• Safe to use: this means that no one will get hurt using the problem and liability is eliminated

• Broad age range: Since all of our partners playgrounds run the gamut of toddler to elementary installations, they wanted to ensure that any mobile product developed for the playground would be able to cater to an age bracket of 3-9 years of age. This would be a challenges for us given that in designing for children, there are numerous developmental segments within the 3-9 bracket to consider. Designing for all of them in one package would require some dextrous thinking.

• Meant to interoperate with manufacturer equipment: This simply means that we would need to incorporate fully the products that our partner created into our user experience. Since most equipment created by this company could already be broadly found at most playgrounds, incorporating their specific features was unproblematic.

Ultimately we realized that this was not a single audience app. Ages 3-9 meant that parents were most certainly going to be the arbiters of this experience, making it a dual audience app. Regardless of the user configuration, parents were (mostly) going to be the ones who decided whether or not to uptake whatever experience we were going to be offering.

Research: In taking on the design lead for this project there were a few obstacles to face. We turned to the literature as well as a few common sense design heuristics regarding the limitations and expectations of mobile device usage.

• One, we had to make sure that we were designing an experience that was intrinsically rewarding—anything designed along the lines of extrinsic motivators would tread into overjustication effects and likely diminish the positive habituation we were looking to instill. As such, the approach I wanted to take was to lean on research in the field of serious games that looked to get kids learning-by-doing…an experience where the outcomes would be seamlessly integrated with engagement. There was an abundance of literature in the field to lean on here.

• Secondly, it was important to consider child and device safety. Having a child run around the playground with a device in-hand would put them and the mobile device in danger—not to mention that there would be a considerable potential for screen-fixation during usage that would need to be nipped in the bud. Field-testing with product iterations would be key here.

• Finally, we’d have to figure out how to incorporate the parent—this was going to be a product that the parent would likely be the first gatekeeper for upon discovery at the playground, but also, research was clearly pointing at the fact that parental attention and engagement was a positive reinforcer of their children’s physical activity. Surveys (more literature) and ethnographic data were critical research components here.

Proposed Solution: To solve the initial challenge then of keeping our experience intrinsic, I wanted to design for activity that would arise naturally from an activity we were asking kids to take on. This meant emulating the way many of us remember playing as kids in the playground: producing a fictional premise for engagement, whether it’s scenario-based, tv-based, comic-based etc….and then pretending you (and friends!) were doing that thing. Games ask this of us all the time, and for kids in our target 3-9 age bracket, we know they take on premise-based engagement in their gameplay as a matter of habit…and eagerly so.

So if a game session is going to be about a grand prix race, the child would be the car and the terms of engagement for such a scenario would be more or less instantly clear. This meant that gameplay was all about ‘embodiment’, not the screen - intuitively doing the things make believe play affords, but with the bonus of a screen to reinforce the imaginative premise.

This led seamlessly into the second aspect, which was the role of the device. Having the device in the child’s hand would be a mistake—they’re on the playground, they need their hands free to do ‘playground stuff’. This is how ‘refereed mode’ came to be. If the child was going to be engaging in play AS the avatar, the parent was then in a position to act as the locus of confirmation and reward. Sending kids away from the phone and then having them come back to perform the role of treasure hunter or archeologist via a mini-game on the phone, not only involves the parent, which we know positively enhances MVPA, but also allows the device to become an object or activity that further upholds the imaginative premise the child is engaging in. While there is much I can get into here, the Game Developers Conference talk I gave above (see YouTube link) walks through a good portion of my testing and conceptual development process.

Testing The Design Premise: We tested in multiple phases to accommodate the challenges we foresaw in adopting a ‘dual audience’ user model. We did this through phases, early surveys in refining the offering’s messaging, testing early prototypes with parents and children to work through UI kinks, and then ultimately, more full fledged prototypes in the field with children to ensure that the formula was indeed fun for kids. We had to test for 3 different developmental stages of children given the broad request of our partner to service the 3-9 age range. The mediation of the parent in this configuration would end up being a critical factor in managing that level of user breadth.

Evaluation and Validation:

With a deployment partnership established with Burke Playgrounds, and a research partnership now established with children park researchers at the RAND Corporation, Biba products see use in over 4,500 playgrounds around the world with over 8 million minutes played. We evaluate the success our product design along a number of axes:

• Embedded trials continue to show that Biba is a success in motivating families to play. In a most recent study of families, 70% of families said that Biba motivated their child to prompt a visit to the playground, with the same amount of families also saying that the product at some point had successfully extended their trip to the playground.

• Arms length published research demonstrates that our product is effective in achieving its objectives with regard to moderate to vigorous physical activity among our target audience. The study can be found in the Journal of Child Health Care here.

• The Biba product’s innovation caught the attention of a number of organizations. Most recently, the product was the recipient of one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2019 and named as one of Fast Company’s ‘World’s Most Innovative Companies’ award in 2019.

• Schools and communities continue to want to work with us in furthering the product in getting more kids back outside and partners such as Sony, DHX Media and PBS have helped us in doing that.