Bentkey
A #1 kids streaming platform, crafted across every screen a family watches on.
Bentkey is a streaming service for kids and families, with new shows and films of its own. It had to launch on phones, tablets and connected TVs on the same day, with no app and no design language to start from. I directed the product and the design and led the team that built it, three product designers and a systems designer, inside Bentkey's own teams.
Highlights
- Design embedded with engineering, product and the business
- Scoped to what a family needs on day one
- Made for the parent as much as the child
- Six platforms on one standard
- Small moments given the care of the big flows
Problem
Bentkey came to Format-3 with a launch date and the shows already made. The content set the bar. It was beautiful, for children and for the adults watching beside them, and the app had to be worthy of it. So there were two people to serve at once: the child who watches, and the parent who chooses what a child watches and has to feel confident handing over the screen.
A five-year-old and an eleven-year-old want different things from that screen, and each platform came with its own remote and its own rules.
We put the content at the center and built one language around it. The artwork carries the interface, so each child gets a home that is theirs, and a phone, a tablet and a TV read as one product.
The scope
A launch date does not build everything, so the first decision was what the service had to be on day one and what it could become after. Every idea went through three questions: what does the audience want, what can the infrastructure carry, and how does this become a business. What passed all three was day one. The rest took a column on a roadmap the whole company could read.
That happened inside Bentkey's own teams, with content, engineering, marketing and the business in the same conversations. Design set the pace of the roadmap and checked the work against it every week.
For the child and the parent
For the child, simplicity. The visual register sits between the ages, so nothing feels babyish to an eleven-year-old or grown-up to a five-year-old. The rows adapt to each child, so two children in one house open two different homes.
For the parent, confidence. The law that protects children online, COPPA in the United States, decides what a service may ask of a child and what only a parent can answer. We designed that in from the first flow. The decisions sit in the parent's path at the moment they are being made, and the child's path never asks. A parent who trusts the shows sees the same care in the app that carries them.
Every screen
A ten-foot interface driven by a remote and a phone in a small hand are two different design problems, and both had to feel like one product. So the language was decided once and applied everywhere, the same cards and the same player, with each platform's own conventions kept where a family would notice them. iOS and Android, Roku, Fire TV, LG and the web: six stores, one standard.
The small moments
The moments a family remembers are small, and the small ones become the big ones. The download that fills while a child watches it. The emoji slider that asks a seven-year-old what they thought of a show. Those were designed with the flows rather than after them, with the motion and 3D designer brought in for exactly that. The downloads feature got a release film of its own, which I directed.
How it was made
I set the direction, reviewed every screen and stayed in the pixels alongside the team. After launch the work ran on the numbers. Each release was judged against the app's ratings and its analytics and tested with families before it shipped.
The shows were the reason a family opened the app. The team built the one those shows deserved: a language a child can own and a parent can trust, the same on every screen in the house, and the same in every release.
Launched as the #1 kids app on the App Store; the 4.7 rating held through the releases that followed.
“Format-3 have been instrumental to the growth of our Product and Technology teams. They embedded themselves into our organization and completely transformed not only our Product team but also our Culture.”
