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Page title

BPP
Education

Enhancing BPP’s learning platform for speed, scale, and engagement

Services Provided
Engineering
Specialisms
JavaScript
TypeScript
React Native
CI / CD
Agile Delivery
Terraform
AWS
Platforms
Android App
iOS App
API

The Challenge

BPP’s legacy mobile app met some of the learner community’s needs, but as the requirements of its students and educators continue to evolve, BPP has bold ambitions to enhance their mobile app to optimise the user experience and ensure long-term scalability.

The Client
BPP is a global education provider delivering a full range of qualifications for professionals at every stage of their career, including professional qualifications, university degrees, apprenticeships, work-based learning & accredited short courses.
Client’s Goal
The client’s goal was to empower students and educators with a personalised, intuitive mobile app that provides access to key features that support learning at every stage.

The Approach

BPP serves tens of thousands of students and the need for a seamless mobile experience is vital for students and educators alike. While the legacy app served as a critical tool for learners, there were opportunities to enhance usability, streamline performance, and expand functionality. Users occasionally experienced slower load times and latency, and the experience could be more intuitive to navigate.

In addition, the absence of built-in analytics made it challenging to gather insights into learner behaviour and feature usage. Maintaining separate native codebases for iOS and Android also added to the development team’s workload over time.

To modernise the platform, BPP partnered with YLD for their expertise in software engineering and React Native to rebuild the app and deliver a high-performing, user-centric solution. By switching to React Native, they now benefit from a unified codebase that runs on both iOS and Android platforms.

Through close collaboration with BPP’s team and leading engineering-driven discussions, we completely rebuilt the app along with the backend APIs, empowering their in-house team to take full ownership and easily manage future updates.

To ensure long-term scalability, we supported BPP in refining their product roadmap, helping them define the key engineering and design elements essential for their mobile app. Taking a consultative approach, we asked the right questions to uncover their priorities, enabling them to unify core mobile features and deliver a seamless learning experience.

Improved user communication, engagement, and system performance 

Legacy limitations around user communications created operational bottlenecks. The previous app lacked automated push notifications, which forced BPP to rely solely on manual emails. This manual approach was an inefficient process that placed unnecessary strain on internal teams and delayed critical user updates.

We introduced a centralised notification service integrating both email and push channels, starting with timetable changes and expanding to assignments, internal updates, and news. This system empowers all BPP teams to communicate efficiently, reduces manual overhead, and ensures timely, targeted delivery, boosting user engagement and enabling scalable, real-time communication across the platform.

Accelerated delivery and reduced engineering overhead 

Integrating a comprehensive development framework into the tech stack drastically simplified the implementation of native features like push notifications, haptics, splash screens, and camera access, which were capabilities that previously required days of complex setup and slowed delivery.

By leveraging Expo Application Services (EAS) and its Command-Line Interface (CLI), we streamlined app builds and app store submissions, enabling faster deployment cycles. We utilised Maestro to run automated tests on real app builds, which boosted confidence in code changes and made code reviews faster.

This setup significantly reduced engineering effort, shortened iteration cycles from days to minutes, and improved overall time-to-market, without sacrificing quality or flexibility.

Consistent UX across devices

To deliver a smoother, high-performance app experience across devices, we built on React Native with Expo, enabling native view compilation while leveraging BPP’s existing JavaScript and TypeScript skills. This approach reduced platform-specific complexity, accelerated development cycles, and ensured a consistent user experience. BPP is now also able to refer to the wider and dynamic React community for support. 

For more straightforward and efficient server-state management, we adopted TanStack Query, which is a robust library that simplifies data fetching, caching, and background synchronisation.

It offers an intuitive API with built-in support for automatic caching, pagination, retries, and background updates, helping streamline complex data workflows and reduce boilerplate. As a result, engineering teams gain back valuable time and app reliability improves across the board.

These decisions enabled BPP to scale faster, iterate confidently, and tap into the wider React ecosystem to future-proof their mobile strategy.

Achieved results with a pragmatic approach and a high-performing Agile team

Supporting our engineering team we added an Agile delivery manager who collaborated closely with the Product and Engineering teams, ensuring accurate forecasting of what’s achievable at every phase of developing the product. Through quarterly planning sessions and co-creating the roadmap with BPP, we ensured alignment across all teams.

Looking ahead

As user expectations evolve and BPP advances its strategic growth, our teams remain committed to ongoing collaboration. 

Guided by the product roadmap, we will continue refining the mobile app by integrating AI-driven functionality to deliver a more personalised and seamless user experience. This includes coaching services, intelligent study assistants, career guidance tools, and a responsive chatbot to address common enquiries, transforming the platform into a smarter, more adaptive learning ecosystem.

The Deliverables

The “Learn” feature is a core function of BPP’s mobile app, providing students with seamless access to their enrolled courses and essential course materials, including PDFs, recordings, and other key documents. To enhance this experience, our team successfully integrated Modal, which is a platform designed for educators to share course content online, ensuring a smooth connection between the mobile app and the Hub.

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One of the most critical additions to the revamped BPP app was the cross-platform Timetable feature, now available on both iOS and Android. This feature is new to the BPP app, which now gives students easy access to all relevant academic events in one place. Rolling out this new feature played a key role in achieving a 96% adoption rate, demonstrating strong immediate user engagement.

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The “Check-in” feature is a critical component of the mobile app, serving as the primary method for BPP and students to record attendance. Given the importance of attendance records for visa requirements and regulatory compliance, this feature plays a vital role in maintaining accurate and reliable tracking.

Closing the Engagement

Our strategic collaboration led to a feature-rich, intuitive platform that transforms the user experience and strengthens BPP’s leadership in education and technology.

By adopting an Agile approach, we enabled BPP to bring mobile app management in-house, eliminating costly vendor dependencies and significantly reducing time-to-market. 

Our structured discovery sessions gave us deep insight into BPP’s operational challenges, enabling us to build a focused team and deliver a minimum viable product (MVP) in the first 12 weeks. The results were immediate:

  • Adoption rate reached 96% within days of launching the new mobile app, showing strong user uptake
  • 51% increase in engagement, as learners relied more on the app for their studies
  • Timetable interactions rose by 2000%, showing users quickly embraced the calendar and scheduling features.

Ultimately, we empowered BPP to own their product roadmap, enabling faster innovation, greater agility, and lower long-term costs.

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