Yoto makes audio players for small hands to help stave off doomscrolling and social media

London design agency Heirloom has given shape to the newest iteration of the Yoto audio player. We talked to Heirloom founder Jack Godfrey Wood, designer Yemima Lorberbaum, and Tom Ballhatchet, VP Innovation at Yoto, about the 4th generation Yoto Player and Yoto Mini, two devices aimed squarely at de-screenifying the childhood experience of the modern audio and media landscape.

Yoto was born via Kickstarter just over ten years ago, with the idea of building a friendly, child-focused audio player for telling stories, telling the time and providing access to curated daily content. It was a cult hit, and over three iterations the design language was honed and refined to make it more suitable for little hands without deviating from the strong values of the founders.

Ballhatchet (who designed and assembled those very first units) and the Yoto team turned to Heirloom to make the card-driven player more scalable, adding greater scope for accessing content without ever letting users fall down the rabbit hole of screen addiction. The utter simplicity of the original – two buttons, a low-resolution screen, card slot and inbuilt speaker – has been retained and refined, with the newest innovation being the addition of a navigation wheel, the ‘Green Button’, to aid discovery.

Featuring softer corners and radii, the Yoto Player is still friendly and lightly anthropomorphic without dipping too much into a cartoon-like creature. ‘It’s a fine line,’ Ballhatchet admits, ‘we didn’t want to be a character, but we wanted to be characterful.’ ‘With a grown-up product, you’re often forced to be quite serious,’ admits Godfrey Wood. Yoto’s primary colours, chunky buttons and satisfying click mechanisms are anything but, although behind the simplicity of the interface is a sophisticated content creation operation.

Yoto was originally pitched at three- to five-year-olds, although the upper age range has crept up to eight and beyond as the device and audience have grown up. Yoto has found that children favour hanging onto to their players rather than age out of it, and its dual functionality as a straightforward Bluetooth speaker certainly helps.

So too does the impressive roster of content Yoto has built up over the years, from classic audiobooks to new releases, in-house commissions and Yoto Daily, a pint-sized podcast aimed squarely at the target audience with songs, facts of the day and a breezy disposition. Nearly 3,000 episodes have been made. It’s a little cultish, but in a good way, with many of the tech company’s family members having been willing guinea pigs for the devices from the outset, feeding back into what works and what doesn’t.

Most importantly, the Yoto Player is substantially more palatable than letting a young child loose on the platforms to find content themselves. With screen-driven parenting is becoming more and more socially unacceptable, Yoto wants to provide a true alternative.

The Player is a true 360-degree product in the way that it is shaped – no one way is up. A wedge shape on one side allows the player to be angled and flipping it turns on the nightlight. Ballhatchet admits that the Green Dial is a ‘big bet’ innovation, one that triggered fierce internal debate, along with back and forth with the team at Heirloom.

In short, the youngest users tend to access content via the smartcards, which don’t contain any media but act as a switch to listen to a story or audiobook. Player can store this media on the 64GB of internal memory, and whilst earlier iterations allowed this library to be explored via the two buttons, the new dial makes for more intuitive navigation.

As Godfrey Wood reiterates, ‘it’s a menu, not a screen’, and time was spent making sure the graphics, icons, and reactive animations weren’t too ‘sticky’. ‘Animation, etc., is counter to the goal [of the device],’ he clarifies. ‘We consciously didn’t want to make [something like] a fidget spinner,’ says Ballhatchet, ‘there’s a happy friction, but you can’t scroll infinitely…. Our original Kickstarter manifesto stated that we wouldn’t employ manipulative tricks.’

Avoiding the urge to weaponize distraction is definitely counter to the ambitions of most tech companies. ‘Our key metric is weekly active families,’ Ballhatchet says, explaining how family engagement is the goal, making the Yoto Player a part of a supervised routine rather than a digital babysitter. Parents control the set-up and content via a separate app and while the simple card system lays out the available content is easy-to-understand ways for smaller children, there’s also the ability to create personalised custom audio – reading a bedtime story, for example.

All this is supported by the newest addition to the Yoto family, the Yoto Mini, which gets the same Green Dial navigation system, alongside physical changes that enhance its tactile feel and the same playful aesthetic. Reference points included classic toys from the American giant Fisher-Price, while the timeless look and feel of the hardware cloaks all the heavy lifting done by the software and the back-end content team. Detail design extends all the way to the USB cables, with grips designed to be friendly to small fingers (as well as a little winking face Easter egg).

‘We definitely leave room for joy,’ Ballhatchet confirms. ‘The designs aren’t austere,’ Godfrey Wood acknowledges, ‘it’s one of the rare kids’ products that adults are happy to have in their home.’ According to Ballhatchet, ‘it was a conscious decision to create something that endures long after the kids have grown-up.’

‘What’s unique about working with Yoto on future products is that it becomes a big discussion about morals,’ says Lorberbaum, ‘often the designer is the one representing the human side, but here it is Yoto. It’s very rare that a start-up makes a decision to follow a simple strategy so early on.’

The more tech-savvy can eke out a little more from their Yoto devices. A burgeoning community and the occasional hacks have surfaced, allowing cards to carry routines like toothbrush timers or tap into plane identification software. You could even create a card that turns the speaker into a radio after the children have gone to bed.

Yoto Player and Yoto Mini excel at their primary purpose of opening up worlds of imagination. Yet like all the best technology design, the hardware has longevity baked in, helping ensure a long lifecycle and flexible future use.

Available to order now from UK.YotoPlay.com, @YotoPlay

Heirloom.co, @h_e_i_r_l_o_o_m