Toca Boca CEO Björn Jeffery describes the unique approach they took with designing the user interface of Toca Builders, the company’s latest construction and crafting app for kids:

Now it may sound counter-intuitive to have characters as an interface, but the fact is that this works surprisingly well for our young builders. Instead of thinking about which buttons to press in order to create a certain effect, kids can identify themselves with certain characters and the construction powers they have. If they want to repaint a structure, they don’t have to look through a menu to find the “repainting button” but instead, remember that Jum Jum the Painter can shoot paint from a long distance to make something a different color. In essence, the player becomes each character for brief periods of time and by that, the question of how to create something is suddenly solved. The app removes the abstraction that a traditional menu would introduce and moves straight into identification instead.