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| Role | Product Game Designer |
|---|---|
| Company | Nestlums, in partnership with Thought Machine |
| Focus | Financial literacy, kids' product design, game mechanics, savings goals, task-based rewards |
| Contribution | Product design, UI design, icon design |
| Team | 1 product designer, 1 engineer |
| Year | 2019 |
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Nestlums set out to make financial literacy fun and accessible for children long before they open a bank account or own a phone.
Built in partnership with Thought Machine, the product combined playful characters, savings goals and task-based rewards to teach real-world money skills through game-like interactions. The aim was to help children build a healthier relationship with money by connecting effort, saving and progress in a way that felt concrete rather than abstract.
The challenge was not simply to make finance look playful. The app needed to be intuitive for children, trusted by parents and grounded in meaningful offline behaviours.
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Most financial products are designed around adult assumptions: reading ability, future planning, numerical confidence and a clear understanding of money as a system. Nestlums had to work for children who were still developing those foundations.
That created a different design problem. The interface needed to make progress visible without relying on dense information, and it needed to teach financial behaviour without feeling like a lesson.
| Design challenge | Product implication | Design opportunity |
|---|---|---|
| Children have short attention spans | Progress and feedback needed to be immediate | Use rewards, characters and simple loops to keep the experience engaging |
| Children may have limited literacy | The UI could not depend on long explanations | Use visual metaphors, icons and clear interaction patterns |
| Parents need trust and control | The product had to feel safe, purposeful and understandable | Balance playful mechanics with clear task and savings structures |
| Money can feel abstract | Savings needed to connect to real-world behaviour | Link tasks, effort and rewards into one visible feedback loop |
The strategic question was: how do you make saving feel rewarding without teaching children to chase rewards for their own sake?
I led the end-to-end product and game design process, from shaping the educational direction to designing the core mechanics, UI and visual system.
Because the team was small, the work moved across product thinking, interaction design, visual design and implementation support. I had to make the concept understandable enough to build, playful enough for children and credible enough for parents.
| Area | What I led |
|---|---|
| Product framing | Defined how the app could teach money habits through play rather than adult banking metaphors |
| Game mechanics | Designed the task, reward and savings loops that connected offline behaviour to in-app progress |
| Interaction design | Shaped flows that worked for children with short attention spans and developing literacy |
| UI design | Created a vibrant, approachable interface with minimal text and clear progress signals |
| Icon and visual design | Designed playful icons and interface elements that helped children understand actions quickly |
| Parent-child experience | Balanced child engagement with the structure and trust parents needed from the product |
