Redesigning how children ages 2–6 learn to feel, connect, and grow.
A social-emotional learning app for children ages 2–6, built in partnership with Sesame Workshop. Homer had the platform. I had 6 months to make it real.
HOMER partnered with Sesame Workshop during the pandemic to build a new social-emotional learning app from scratch — helping children who lacked in-person socialization learn to identify emotions, manage feelings, and navigate peer relationships alongside their Sesame Street friends.
To accelerate development, we reused structural components from the HOMER Learn & Grow app I had worked on previously. That foundation shaped everything — and constrained some things too.
I was appointed lead designer for the project, working under a design manager with a cross-functional team spanning product, curriculum, engineering, and outside illustration vendors. I also collaborated directly with the Sesame Street stakeholder team — navigating a complex approval process across two organizations with different priorities and design sensibilities.
We spent a week in a design sprint before touching a single screen. It was the right call.
Before the project kicked off, I researched around 20 apps in the SEL, wellness, and education space to map the competitive landscape. Most were either too adult-directed, too gamified, or too content-heavy for very young children.
Page 2 — the full competitive analysis grid showing competitor apps analyzed across main menu, search, sub-menu, content, and activity screens.
To align both organizations, the HOMER team ran a week-long design sprint with around 20 participants from Homer and Sesame — covering business strategy, curriculum goals, and product design. I helped plan and facilitate alongside the Director of Product and Design Manager.
After the sprint, I built out user personas for both children and their parents and caregivers — since the app had to work for both simultaneously.
Page 3 middle — four detailed persona cards. Show in a 2×2 grid.
Children ages 2–4 cannot read category labels. Any navigation system that relied on text was silently failing our youngest users.
This single finding shaped every design decision that followed.
Three goals. Each tied to something measurable.
Make content discovery work without reading
The app had 1,000+ pieces of content. Kids couldn't find anything — not because there was too little, but because the navigation assumed literacy. We needed a system that worked for a 2-year-old navigating alone.
Build an "Our Neighborhood" world that felt alive
We tested multiple art styles and app store prototypes with real children and parents before locking a direction. The winning concept used Sesame Street's iconic locations as navigation hubs — giving children a spatial, character-led mental model instead of a category list.
Design for sequential content consumption
Sesame Workshop decided mid-project that each location would represent a specific SEL theme — the Playground for Kindness and Empathy, the School for Navigating Social Spaces — with content experienced in a specific order. This changed the navigation problem entirely and required a full redesign of the submenu system.
A location-based main menu, icon-only navigation, and a content flow system that guided children without them knowing they were being guided.
The main menu became a richly illustrated neighborhood map — each building representing a content theme. Children navigated by tapping locations, not reading labels. Characters were placed throughout to draw attention and signal interactivity.
Page 4 right — the final illustrated neighborhood scene as the primary navigation system.
The submenu system went through two full redesigns. The first version used illustrated background scenes with tappable characters — children froze, confused about whether the background was a video. We scrapped it entirely.
Page 5 middle — six location submenu screens from the first version. Children confused interactive elements with video.
The second version used a minimalist monochrome background to separate it visually from the main menu, with horizontally scrolling content buttons featuring icons and titles for parent legibility.
Pages 5–6 — before showing the cluttered illustrated submenu, after showing the clean monochrome version.
Content flow from unit menu through connective tissue and payoff screens.
Navigation between content pieces used an autoplay system with gentle nudges, payoff moments, and connective menus — guiding children through a themed sequence without requiring decisions at every step.
The hardest part wasn't the design. It was advocating for the user inside a stakeholder structure that wasn't built for it.
The Sesame Street team required sign-off on every aspect of the app. They were primarily accustomed to designing for older audiences and sometimes made assumptions about 2–6 year olds that didn't hold up in testing. Branding consistently took priority over usability, which created recurring tension.
The most significant challenge came midway through: Sesame changed the content architecture entirely, moving from random assortments to themed content units per location. This invalidated the submenu designs we'd already built. Because engineering hadn't started on the wireframes yet, we were able to pivot — but it compressed the timeline significantly.
The app launched on time for Q4. It reached millions of children.
The Learn with Sesame Street app shipped on schedule with a multi-layered neighborhood navigation system, themed content units across five SEL domains, and a content flow designed to guide children through structured emotional learning sequences.
The location-based navigation tested well with children — they understood the spatial model quickly and could find their way back to favorite content. The submenu redesign, though visually imperfect in one respect, performed better in usability testing than the original illustrated version.
Page 7 — the full app demo video. Embed as click-to-play. This is the strongest single artifact — the product working.
What I'd do differently, and what I'd protect.
Push for clearer stakeholder alignment at the start — specifically around who has final design authority when brand and UX decisions conflict. Advocate for more testing with children under 3, where our signal was weakest. Document the information architecture in writing before any design begins, so a mid-project pivot has a cleaner path to resolution.
The design sprint. Getting both organizations in the same room for a week before touching any screens was the single best investment we made. Every major decision that followed had a shared foundation.
The bigger lesson: designing for children is humbling. Every assumption you bring in from adult product design gets tested hard. The kids don't lie.