Balancing fun, safety, and commerce for Cartoon Network's 9M+ young players.

The audience shaped the interaction model. Navigation, feedback, reading level, motor precision, and recovery states all had to be designed for children's actual behavior, not adult assumptions.

The business needed a commerce model that could support virtual purchases without creating confusion, accidental spending, or trust issues for parents — while the product also needed to be genuinely enjoyable for a 6 to 12 year old audience playing on older hardware.

I used direct observation, playtesting, and practical design constraints to shape the experience. CN's playtesting program confirmed the same pattern consistently: features that are not visible are treated as features that do not exist. I designed flows that were explicit, visual, and forgiving, with clear feedback at each step. Parent consent and purchase confirmation were treated as core parts of the experience, not compliance steps added at the end.

The product needed to be enjoyable for children, understandable to parents, and viable for the business. Designing for those needs together prevented the experience from becoming either too commercial, too complex, or too restrictive.

I designed the commerce path as a guided flow, not a standard adult checkout experience — with a clear path from game entry through browsing, preview, confirmation, and parental consent, and confirmation moments that helped prevent accidental purchases.

The product needed to sell virtual items without violating trust. Children needed to understand what they were selecting, what it cost, and what would happen next. Parents needed confidence that purchases, account creation, and consent were handled clearly.

I mapped the end-to-end path from landing in the experience to browsing, previewing, confirming, and completing parent consent. I designed the shop around visual comparison and character customization because children needed to see what they were getting before committing. The flow included confirmation layers, clear currency presentation, and a parental consent checkpoint at the right moment.

A child-facing commerce flow has to do more than convert. It has to create trust. The design supported the business model while reducing ambiguity for children and parents.

The product needed decision rules that could hold across onboarding, gameplay, commerce, inventory, account creation, and safe social features. I created practical principles the team could use to evaluate whether each surface supported child comprehension, parent trust, and platform goals.

The principles helped keep the product coherent as the experience grew. They gave the team a way to make tradeoffs when business goals, safety requirements, gameplay, and child comprehension were in tension.

Free gameplay created access and desirability. Premium currency supported the business model. Preview and confirmation helped children understand purchase decisions. Parent consent created a trust checkpoint at the right moment. Safe chat and monitored social patterns supported community with guardrails.

Premium content needed to feel desirable without creating pressure or confusion. COPPA-aware account and consent requirements needed to be integrated into the flow. Parents needed to understand and trust the experience, while children needed something that still felt fun, direct, and rewarding.

The commerce system required the most careful design judgment on the project. I designed around earned and purchased value — players could unlock items through gameplay and use premium currency for special items. Purchase moments were intentionally structured with preview, comparison, confirmation, and consent. I also designed account and social patterns around safety: safe chat, guarded social behavior, and clear account boundaries so children could participate without the product depending on unrestricted communication.

The product could support revenue without treating children like adult shoppers. The experience needed to earn parent trust while still giving children a reason to play, customize, and return.

The work created patterns for onboarding, virtual currency, inventory, purchase preview, confirmation, parent consent, and safe social interaction. As the sole designer and researcher, I established the full design language for Project Exonaut, and the interaction principles carried forward to subsequent CN web game projects across the platform's three-year lifespan.

I created a shared design approach that connected game mechanics, commerce, consent, and safety. I also used observation and playtesting to challenge assumptions. If a design did not work for children in practice, it needed to change, even if it looked clear to adults. The strategic challenge was holding four constraints in balance: premium content that supported the business model, child-centered patterns that avoided manipulation, parental consent flows that protected a legally sensitive audience, and advertising placements that met COPPA standards without undermining the play experience.

This project built the foundation for how I think about design in high-constraint environments. The constraints were real: child comprehension, parent trust, compliance, business goals, performance, and gameplay. The work succeeded because those constraints were treated as part of the product strategy, not obstacles around it.