MoneyKids

Financial concepts can be difficult for children because many of them are abstract. Saving, spending, earning, budgeting, needs, wants, and making financial decisions are easier to understand when children can connect them to situations they already recognise.

The challenge was therefore bigger than designing attractive screens. The experience needed to introduce financial ideas without overwhelming children, make learning interactive without turning everything into a game, show progress clearly, make rewards meaningful, and give parents enough control without making the child experience feel controlled.

The redesign also had to make social features feel fun while keeping appropriate parental oversight, and make all of these individual features feel like one product. That became an opportunity to rethink MoneyKids as a connected learning system rather than a collection of individual screens.

One of the biggest shifts in the product was recognising that MoneyKids serves two very different audiences. The child needs room to explore and interact with the product without feeling like they are using a school portal, while the parent needs enough visibility and control to understand what is happening and step in where necessary.

This meant the product could not simply have one experience adapted for everyone. It needed to give children their own space while giving parents the control and visibility they need.

One of the key design decisions happened before the child even started learning. Previously, the experience pushed users towards authentication early, so the redesign let children experience the product before being pushed into sign-up.

A child can begin interacting with the learning experience, explore lessons, scenarios, quizzes, and other parts of the product before being forced into an immediate commitment. The idea was simple: let the product demonstrate its value before asking the user to commit to it.

This reduces the feeling of friction at the beginning of the journey and gives MoneyKids an opportunity to communicate what the experience actually feels like. Sign-up and subscription can then appear when they make more sense within the journey.

Learning in MoneyKids is structured as a journey rather than a list of disconnected topics. The map gives children a sense that there is somewhere to go and something to work towards.

Lessons introduce concepts, scenarios give those concepts context, quizzes let children test what they understood, and the progress system makes that movement visible. The map therefore became more than navigation; it became part of the motivation system.

A child should be able to look at the journey and understand where they are, what they have completed, what they can do next, and what they are working towards.

The learning experience is built around three connected moments that move a child from understanding a concept to applying it and checking what they learned.

Together, these moments create a small learning loop: Understand → Apply → Check → Progress. The sequence helped move the experience away from simply presenting information and towards active participation.

Gamification was not treated as decoration. XP, coins, streaks, achievements, badges, and rewards each give the child a different reason to continue and a different way to understand progress.

XP communicates progress, coins create a reward currency, streaks encourage consistency, achievements recognise milestones, and badges give children something to collect and identify with.

The important part was making these systems feel connected to learning rather than making the product feel like a game with financial content added to it. A child should understand that something happened because they completed a lesson, answered questions, maintained a streak, or reached a milestone. That small sense of cause and effect makes progress more meaningful.

The leaderboard introduces another layer of motivation. Children can progress through leagues, see how they are performing during the week, and work towards promotion.

The system gives progression a visual reward through badges, trophies, and reward chests, but the important part was making the leaderboard feel like part of the MoneyKids world rather than copying another product's visual language.

Promotion gives children something to work towards, demotion creates stakes, weekly summaries give the experience a sense of rhythm, and rewards make the end of the week feel meaningful. Together, those pieces make competition supportive of the learning journey rather than a distraction from it.

Not every child will want to learn in exactly the same way, so MoneyKids also introduces other learning experiences beyond the main lesson path, including games and flashcards. These experiences give children more ways to practise financial concepts without replacing the core learning journey.

The profile becomes more than a place to store information. It gives children a visible identity in the product. The profile also gives children a place to see what they have accomplished. The badge and achievement systems make the profile feel personal rather than purely numerical.

The social experience introduced another important design consideration. Children can add friends using usernames or suggestions, but friend relationships are not completely autonomous because parents remain involved in friend requests.

Parents can approve or decline requests, giving children the opportunity to have a social experience while keeping an important layer of parental oversight.

There are also moments where children can ask friends for coins or XP. A child may receive a request such as “Alex needs 50 coins from you,” and decide whether to send them. The interaction is intentionally simple, while the parental controls help keep the social layer appropriate for the product.

The parent experience also changed significantly. Instead of treating the parent as another layer inside the child's profile, the redesign gives parents their own profile and their own experience.

The parent dashboard provides a clearer place to manage children, understand progress, and handle account-related actions. Adding children was also simplified so that the information parents need to provide can be handled without unnecessary friction.

After payment or account setup, parents can understand their children at a glance and move into the appropriate child experience. The product therefore has two connected experiences rather than one experience trying to serve everyone at once.

The visual direction needed to feel playful without becoming noisy. MoneyKids uses a warm, approachable visual language with rounded forms, friendly illustrations, bold colour, soft visual depth, and expressive details.

Designing for children also reinforced that children do not need everything to be colourful; they need things to be understandable. Clear feedback, strong hierarchy, obvious interaction states, and understandable cause and effect matter more than decoration.

The colours, characters, illustrations, cards, patterns, badges, and rewards work best when they support comprehension first and excitement second.

Illustration became an important part of making the product feel approachable. Kobo, the MoneyKids mascot, helps give the learning experience a recognisable character and a friendlier point of entry.

Characters and visual moments help make abstract financial ideas easier to enter. Rather than relying on illustration as decoration around the interface, it can support storytelling, introduce situations, celebrate progress, and give different parts of the product their own personality.

My contribution to the visual direction also extended into selected illustration and visual assets used across the experience. The goal was to create a world that children could recognise as their own without making the product feel childish or overly cartoonish.

One of the biggest lessons from working on MoneyKids was that individual screens are only part of the job. A beautiful lesson screen does not solve much if the journey into that lesson is confusing, and a good reward screen does not mean much if the child cannot understand why they received the reward.

The same applies across the rest of the product. A leaderboard is less useful if progression, XP, badges, and rewards are disconnected, and a parent dashboard does not solve the problem if the parent and child experiences still feel like the same account.

The redesign required thinking across the entire product: Onboarding → Learning → Progress → Rewards → Social → Parent. Each part needed to make sense on its own while still contributing to the larger experience.

MoneyKids is not a speculative concept. It is a live product, which changed the way I approached the work because design decisions had to exist within an actual product, existing requirements, engineering considerations, and an evolving visual system.

The work was not simply Design → Present → Done. It involved thinking about how new ideas fit into what already existed, how different features affected one another, and how the experience could evolve without losing its identity.

That constraint made the work more interesting and pushed me to think less about isolated screens and more about the product as something people would actually use.

The redesign brought several parts of the MoneyKids experience into a clearer relationship. The child gets a more independent learning experience, while the parent gets a more purposeful space of their own.

Learning has a clearer structure, progress is more visible, gamification supports the learning journey instead of sitting beside it, social features include parental oversight, and additional learning formats create more ways to engage.

The visual system also gives the product a more cohesive personality. The most important change, however, was not a single screen; it was the shift towards thinking about MoneyKids as a complete learning experience.