Kafshdoozak was a digital storytelling platform that gave children a playful way to create and share their own cartoon stories.
Designing a creative tool for children taught me something quickly: kids are not smaller adults. Instead of expecting them to adapt to the interface, we learned how to make the interface adapt to them.
Kafshdoozak grew into a storytelling experience used by more than 200,000 children every month, achieved 15× user growth, and received the Top-Rated Mobile App Design Award at the 3rd National Sharif Cup.
A visual language that connects discovery, characters and storytelling.
Children could explore stories, create their own cartoon narratives and interact with a visual world designed specifically around them.
Games entertained them. Videos told them stories. Educational apps taught them things. We saw an opportunity for something more participatory: an environment where a child could combine characters, scenes and ideas without learning complicated creative software.
How do you give someone creative freedom… without giving them a complicated tool?
Storytelling products and visual cues children could already recognize.
Traditional usability testing relies on conversation. That becomes less reliable when your participant is six. Children often communicated more through their behaviour than through explanation, making observation one of our most valuable research tools.
A hesitation mattered.
Repeated tapping mattered.
Skipping something mattered.
Dragging the “wrong” thing mattered.
Momentum disappearing mattered.
“I don’t like this.”
Paper-based interfaces let children move buttons, change screens and place characters into scenes. We could simulate interaction before building the product — and observe what static mockups could not give us: behaviour.
Screen layouts explore how scenes, characters and recording controls could fit together.
A storytelling tool naturally wants more characters, backgrounds, props, customization and controls. For a child, each addition can also become another decision to understand.
Characters looked like characters. Scenes looked like places. Actions used recognizable visual cues. Large icons and clear hierarchy reduced the reading required to understand what could happen next.
Visual design wasn’t decoration. It was part of the interaction model.
Explore variation while keeping a shared character language.
A shared visual language brings characters and stories together.
The product shifted toward direct visual interaction with characters, environments and narrative elements. Instead of asking how to make controls clearer, we asked a more useful question:
How do we make the controls disappear into the activity?
Visual choices give children the ingredients for a story.
Play this short, silent animation from the project archive to see the characters inhabiting the story world.
The selection screen and an example story show the connection between choosing visual ingredients and seeing them in a scene.
Illustrated environments make a setting a visual choice.
Characters provide a starting point for a child's own narrative.
Example story scenes combine characters and environments.
Children needed the product to feel exciting. Parents and educators needed confidence in what children were using. Interviews with parents and teachers helped us understand the wider context and the need for a safe, creative storytelling environment.
Successful children’s products exist inside an ecosystem, not just between a user and a screen.
A Java-based digital prototype revealed a new class of questions. Animation changed timing. Interactions behaved differently without a human simulating them. Navigation had to work without a researcher sitting beside the child.
Move the pieces before committing to an interface.
The original screen studies map the actions the digital experience needs to support.
Carry the visual language through the complete experience.
Can a child understand what to do next?
Children every month
User growth
The final visual-first experience let children create and share cartoon narratives around their abilities, rather than forcing them into adult interaction patterns.
A colourful library connects browsing with making.
Arrive at the world the case study has spent the whole page building: stories, characters, discovery and play.
What felt reasonable to an adult designer could be frustrating for a younger user. We increased sizes after seeing how children actually interacted.
If a child repeatedly needed an explanation, changing the interaction was often the better solution.
Children interpreted hierarchy, gestures and visual cues differently than expected. Observation challenged those assumptions.
More customization created more possibility — and more decisions. Expression and simplicity had to remain balanced.
Children taught me to pay closer attention to behaviour. Those signals often reveal more about an interface than a perfectly articulated answer.
“That’s ugly.”
You can spend days researching and designing what you believe is a brilliant feature, and a child may look at it for three seconds, say exactly that, and move on. I loved the lack of decoding. It was a constant reminder that the product wasn’t designed to impress the design team.
It had to work for them.