Designing play, not advertising
A child-safe digital experience for a major US toy & entertainment brand
Role: UX & Visual Design Lead · Timeline: 5 months (Feb–Jul 2025) · Platforms: Mobile, tablet, desktop.
The project is under NDA and I will be sharing only what is allowed/Possible.
How do you make children want a new toy when the law says you can't advertise to them?
A major US toy & entertainment company was launching a new collaborative product line for kids. The catch: regulations on child-directed content (COPPA/FTC) ban direct advertising to under-13s. TV, print, and banner ads were either off-limits or useless. Children had no safe way to discover the product before a parent bought it.
The brief wasn't "build a marketing site." It was "build awareness without advertising." Both are two different problems to solve for the business.
Target Audience
Primary target audience of the brand is young girls aged 3 to 12, a demographic characterized by urban or suburban lifestyles and a desire for imaginative, aspirational play.
Key audience segments include:
Core Demographic: Girls aged 3–12 seeking creativity, empowerment, and role-play.
Purchasers: Parents and guardians who value inclusivity, safety, and developmental benefits.
Nostalgic Consumers: Millennials and older generations who grew up with the brand.
Collectors: Adults interested in fashion, history, and exclusive doll variations.
Results
The website cannot "sell dolls" , but these were the metrics we were allowed to collect post launch on our play website.
+18%
Increase in Users
+17.15%
Increase in time spent on the website
+15.38%
Increase in page veiws
We could figure out that we reached approximately 30,000 new users on the page. Assuming a conversion rate of 0.5% conversion rate, we are looking at 150 dolls sold through awareness created by the website in the first two weeks.
The Insight
Compliance wasn't a constraint bolted onto the design. It was the design.
No data capture. No social sharing. No "buy now." No identity-linked personalisation. Strip all the usual engagement levers away and one thing is left: play itself has to carry the entire emotional payload.
Principle: Every interaction should feel like making something — not buying something.
That reframe is the whole case study. It's the difference between a microsite that nags kids and an experience kids choose to return to.
What I designed
A 6-step fashion studio, built touch-first for ages 5–10:
Pick a character from the product lineup
Customise — outfits, hairstyles, accessories (character-specific)
Creation moment — a branded play-tool animation stands in for a loading screen, turning dead time into brand reinforcement
Spotlight reveal — the design walks the runway; the child is the designer
Set the scene — choose a background
Download — save the creation locally; no account, no data, no catch
Every step: large tap targets, minimal reading required, visual-first navigation. Accessibility built to WCAG standards, not retrofitted after.
Challenges I faced
Combinatorial explosion. Multiple characters × outfits × hair × accessories meant the number of final-reveal assets was large and undefined. I built a permutation mapping sheet that enumerated every valid combination — it became the team's production checklist and killed an entire class of missing-state and QA bugs before they happened.
No animator on the team. The creation animation and spotlight reveal were the emotional payoff — and there was nobody to build them. I learned After Effects and Premiere Pro and delivered both to production quality. Goal-driven upskilling beats waiting for headcount.
A stalled asset request. The brand intro needed client assets that hadn't been handed over. I dropped a publicly available clip from the client's own social channels into the prototype demo — concrete enough to unlock the full asset package immediately.
Conclusion
Two constraints that usually fight each other - child safety regulation and genuine engagement were resolved through design rather than traded off. The architecture is repeatable across future product launches.
What will I do better next time
1) Test with actual children. WCAG compliance was met; structured usability testing with 5–10-year-olds (cognitive load, tap affordances, error recovery) was not. That's the gap I'd close first.
2) Deeper customization. Two options per category was the right launch call given asset complexity but 3 to4 would lift replay ability, and better asset tooling makes it cheap.