If you’ve been faithfully reading our newsletters (and we know you are!), you’ll remember our cuddly friends, Pajanimals or the Kindness Counts Community Contest.  I-SITE has teamed up once again with our friends at Sprout to build the Family Challenge iOS game app. Part of a larger ‘healthy living’ initiative called “Be Kind to Yourself“,  the app was designed to encourage  both kids and parents to complete healthy challenges together.

The app utilizes themes from both Sprout and LazyTown programming and presents a parent-child team with ten healthy challenges. Each challenge is comprised of an activity that focuses on healthy eating or exercise. After a parent-child team has completed the activity, they mark it as complete and move on to the next activity. At the completion of a set number of challenges, the parent-child team wins an ‘incentive’ in the form of a music video, theme song or a themed photo frame wallpaper.

From the beginning the process of developing the Family Challenge app was extremely engaging and our team had a great time coming up with creative approaches to the many complexities involved in the project. Here are some highlights.

Design

• The Audience – We had to make sure the design and UI of the app were appealing and usable by both parents and kids.
• Media – As the app is geared towards preschoolers, it is naturally extremely media rich and we had to come up with creative ways of managing the many required graphical and media elements.
• Navigation – The Family Challenge app both tells a story and succinctly guides the user through a series of tasks and activities – an architecting challenge that kept us on our toes.
• Branding – Sprout partnered with Iceland-based children’s television program LazyTown on the Family Challenge App.  Both partners have a distinct, established and highly recognizable brand, including fonts, assets, characters and color palettes.

Development

• Tracking user activity – The app tracks a user’s progress on completing challenges in order to issue the corresponding multimedia incentives. We also had to build the app to allow for a user’s progress to be reset so that they could start over and run through the challenges again.
• Changing Technology – Apple released the iPhone 5 mid-way through our design and development process.  Our designs accounted for the iPhone 5’s new screen height.
• Complex media layers – We built the app to easily manage the many media layers associated with each activity. Media layers  included a Twitter string, Facebook string, voiceover audio file, congratulations message, title, subhead, body, and four associated images.

Ready, set, go!  Head to the App store and download the Family Challenge app today.