Case Study

Playtest with Kids Website Development

Playtest with Kids is a toolkit designed to enable teams to create great products by conducting meaningful research with kids. It’s a part of the suite of digital properties owned by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a nonprofit R&D lab within Sesame Workshop.

The Challenge

This marvelous site has been designed by the client’s in-house design team, and the idea behind the overall look and feel was that it should be playful, a bit quirky, and appealing to an audience of product developers creating digital products for kids. Because of that, the site has a lot of small elements adding to its overall appeal. Building the site required careful attention to detail; we wanted to be sure to assign senior developers to implement all the details that the designers envisioned.

Solution

Since the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop has had a long-term relationship with Nopio and have used our services many times in the past, it was a foregone conclusion that we’d be their first choice. Yes, we’re proud of that!

By our typical project setup, we started with project analysis and created an action plan. The site has been split between 2 teams. One worked on the structure and responsiveness, and another focused on the visual effects, animations, and other fine touches. That approach resulted in a smoother and quicker delivery and allowed us to avoid issues with developers working on the same parts of the site, interrupting each other.

The development process went smoothly, and in the last phase, the tech team spent a lot of time with the client’s creative team fine-tuning the effects, and updating the smallest details on the site. Finally, when the site was ready, all parties admitted that all the hard work was well worth it.

The last step on the way was adjusting the site to the specific hosting setup Sesame Workshop is using. After that, Nopio delivered the project package to the client’s internal IT team.

See the website at https://playtestwithkids.org

Key Deliverables

WordPress Website Build
Full responsiveness
Custom animated elements
CMS Training
Delivery for the client’s custom hosting

What Joan Ganz Conney Center Gained

An easy-to-use website that is tailored to a very specific look and feel

The ability to efficiently work with the content and run marketing experiments

Platform for the end-users to gain and share their methods of interacting with kids

Training and hands-on support when learning how to use the platform.

Testimonial

Catherine Jhee Director, Web & Strategic Communications, Sesame Workshop

I very highly recommend the work of Nopio. It has been a real pleasure to work with Piotr and his team of designers and developers. When we needed some updates to the WordPress templates to make our site mobile compatible, the Nopio went above and beyond the expected level of building and testing.