Nest Egg

Role: UX Designer/Researcher

Date: April 2025

Turn-around Time: 1 Month

Background

I recently took a class on dark patterns and the manipulative use of design. For our final project, we were put into groups and worked with a client to build their dream. With the goal of reducing the amount of dark patterns, the client had, but still giving them a product they enjoyed. As for my group, we were given the idea of Nest Egg, an app for kids that promotes parenthood and helps kids learn while having fun in a game-like setting.

In short, we looked at games like My Talking Tom, Pou, and even the very missed Fig-pals from the Figma software to find our design feel, and from there, created a similar game with the added use of micro-transactions, as we realized there would be no way to truly remove all of the dark patterns.

If you’re curious to get more in-depth with the designs or just want to look at the pictures of our process, look below. 🤙

Starting out

We started out by creating a figjam file in order to gather our thoughts on how to concur the quest of creating an app for kids that would help them learn about parent-hood.

Competitive Analysis

In order to figure out our color choices and type styles we conducted some competitive analysis with some of out favorite childhood games to see what we’re up against as well as what we liked and didn’t

Gathering User Data

Before starting the design we knew we had to get feedback from people to see what would work and what wouldn’t so we conducted some user testing.

Branding

For out app we decided in order to connect to children more and make the app as best we could we choose brighter more friendly and fun colors and type.

The Low-fi version

After getting our user feedback and figuring out our branding we started to design the app. First we created a hand drawn version of the app before spending our time living in Figma. We used this drawn version to get a sense of what screens we wanted and how we wanted the flow of the app to be. This version was key is creating the best design we could.

The Final Design

As for the design of the final version of the app it stayed similar to what we created for the low-fi but we of course had to make it look much better because why live in low-fi when you can work in High-fi. All in all we took out time designing this final version as we wanted to make it look as good as possible. We took everything you hopefully read from above and put it into one fantastic app.

Hope your enjoy it. 😁