How a hesitant investment turned into fuel for growth
Playground123 sells SaaS for playground and open-space safety audits. The product worked, but the way into it was hard, and that was holding back both new customers and the investors the business needed to scale.
CodeFish Studio was brought in to redesign the experience — and to get two decades of audit knowledge out of the founder's head and into a form his development team could build from.
Playground123 had built on ESRI, a serious GIS engine. It could do far more than a safety audit needs, and that was the problem — every new user had to climb a wall of unfamiliar mapping software before reaching the thing they came for.
The cost showed up in two places. Onboarding was slow and hand-held, which capped how fast the business could take on councils and contractors. And the product was hard to demonstrate: an investor shown a complicated GIS interface is being asked to imagine the business it could become, rather than seeing it.
Underneath sat twenty years of Bob's expertise in playground and playspace safety auditing. The knowledge was genuinely valuable and genuinely hard to extract — most of it lived in his head as the sequence and judgement of doing the job, not as anything written down. Any redesign had to get that out first, or it would produce a tidier version of the same problem.
Playground123 sells into a narrow market where the buyers are councils and asset managers, not GIS specialists. The platform had to read to them.
We ran the workshop with Bob and pulled the audit apart step by step: what an auditor sees on arrival, what gets recorded, in what order, and which parts actually matter once you are standing in front of the equipment.
Playground123 were hesitant about it. A workshop is an upfront cost with no visible software at the end, which is hard to sign off when capital is tight. We were direct that it was the piece that mattered most — turning tacit expertise into something a development team could build from without guessing — and worth doing properly before any design work started.
From there we designed around the auditor's actual sequence rather than around the map. The interface leads with the job and treats the spatial data as support, which inverts how the ESRI-based product worked.
We delivered it as a blueprint: screens, flows, states and interface detail complete enough for Playground123's own developers to build against. That mattered, because they were not hiring us to build it. The design had to be unambiguous enough to hand over and survive translation by another team.
Twenty years of audit expertise pulled out of Bob's head and written down.
The auditor's real sequence, with the spatial data supporting the job rather than leading it.
Screens, states and interface detail finished to a standard another team could build from.
A handover complete enough to survive translation by Playground123's own developers.
Playground123's developers built the platform straight from the blueprint, and the interface people use today is the one that came out of that design work. It has not been rewritten since — the execution has held, and it continues to bring users onto the platform.
The clearer experience did its job on both fronts. New users reach a completed audit without being trained through a GIS tool first, which took the drag out of onboarding. And the platform became something that could be shown rather than explained, which is what shifted the investor conversations and strengthened Playground123's position in its market.
The structure also left room to grow. Adding to the product no longer means working around someone else's mapping engine first, so the business can extend the platform as it scales instead of rebuilding to escape it.
The interface built from the blueprint is the one users work in today.
New users reach a completed audit without learning a GIS tool first.
A platform that could be demonstrated rather than explained.
Adding to the product no longer means working around someone else's engine.
We were initially hesitant about the overall investment, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions we made. The flexibility of their design has allowed us to grow with confidence, and we're in a much stronger position now.
