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Lootlock
Lootlock is an online platform designed to help families effectively and easily manage online gaming budgets.
It allows parents to set spending limits, monitor transactions, and promote responsible gaming habits. Designed to provide control and peace of mind, LootLock ensures kids can enjoy their favorite games without the risk of overspending.
Lootlock
Clare Nguyen, Nick Pompa (CEO/PM), and Alexandra Moskowitz (FE Engineer)
Lead product designer
Competitive analysis, design system, surveying, interviewing, usability testing, prototyping, UI design, UX design, UX writing, wireframing
August 2024 - May 2026
Background
In July 2024, an old co-worker connected me with her friend Nick, who was looking for an experienced product designer for his start-up.
He described a problem that has made countless headlines: a parent adds their credit card to a device to enable a one-time purchase. At least they think it'll be a one-time purchase. Before they know it, their child has made dozens (or even hundreds) of in-app transactions, racking up significant charges.
I was on board the next day.
Results
Took Lootlock from idea to MVP in under a year, designing the full product, brand, WCAG 2.2-compliant design system, and marketing website while working evenings and weekends.
Launched at PAX East 2025 to warm, positive feedback from attendees, which led to interviews with parent-run podcasts, gaming channels, and more.
Conversations at PAX showed us that its attendees tend to be tech-savvy parents, which gave us a clearer picture of the less tech-savvy audience Lootlock needed to reach.
35%
Improved onboarding process
25%
Increase in user retention
84%
Increase in time spent on website
Research
As a gamer myself, I knew this problem had plagued families for as long as in-game purchases have existed. But when I dug into the space, I found no product that addressed it, especially not one built for gaming.
So I widened my scope to financial products for kids and families. Why reinvent the wheel? Products like Greenlight and Acorns Early offered strong parental controls, engaging financial literacy, and supervised investing. Their pitfalls were poor customer service, expensive subscriptions, limits on family members, and paywalling the most interesting perks behind higher tiers.
Goals
We planned to launch the MVP at PAX East in May 2025, so we had our work cut out for us. Nick and I narrowed MVP down to four core areas:
Dashboard - An overview of the family's wallets, requests, and recent activity
Wallet - Managing payment methods, adding funds, and sending funds to kids
Family - Adding family members, inviting kids to create accounts, and viewing each child's account
Bounty boards - Creating custom or templated bounties (or chores!) and setting how much a child earns for completing them
Design
Wireframes
With most web traffic coming from mobile devices, I started with a mobile-first experience. As I wrapped up each low-fidelity workflow, I sent it to Nick and Alex, our front-end developer, for feedback. Even running extremely lean, I wanted us to communicate and collaborate well.
Branding
With most web traffic coming from mobile devices, I started with a mobile-first experience. As I wrapped up each low-fidelity workflow, I sent it to Nick and Alex, our front-end developer, for feedback. Even running extremely lean, I wanted us to communicate and collaborate well.
Design system
With the palette and typography in place, building the components was relatively quick and painless. I used a 4dp grid rather than the more common 8dp so I could use 12dp spacing when 8dp felt too "squished" and 16dp too "wide." Iterating was the easy part. The toughest part was writing the documentation. Thankfully, Alex understood my very bare bones best practices!
High-fidelity mockups
Because I put so much effort into my wireframes, the high fidelity mockups were mostly plug and play. The design system worked like a sticker sheet. After a longer discussion, we also designed desktop versions, placing each one side-by-side with its mobile variation so anyone could see how the layout would respond.
Website
While Alex built the product, I designed the website in Wix for our PAX East launch. We didn't have as many features as our competitors, so I kept it simple, on one page, with a hero section, how it works, pricing, and contact. I used product mockups throughout to give visitors a glimpse of Lootlock.
Conclusion
In short, putting together Lootlock from start to finish for MVP was a great opportunity for me to see how far I’d developed as a product designer in the past five years. The last time I had done something similar had been for my capstone project with Springboard – all the way back in 2020!
Although there’s still a lot to do now that it’s available to the general public, I’m quite pleased with myself and with my team for the amount of work we put in. Despite all of us contributing during our evenings or weekends, we managed to achieve so much in a relatively short period of time.
We did end up debuting at PAX East 2025 and it was a hit. The feedback we received from attendees was incredibly warm and positive. What we realized, however, is that the people who attend PAX are usually parents who are incredibly tech-savvy in the first place.
Despite that small “d’oh!” moment, the conversations we had were immeasurable. Nick was able to secure a few interviews with parent-run podcasts, gaming channels, and more.
I’m excited to see what our next phase will be and how my designs will help us get there!