Almost every kids' app has rewards. Most borrow from games built for adults: streaks, coins, stores, and loot boxes.

Designing rewards for Bili, a bilingual learning app for kids ages 3 to 8, I kept coming back to a simple question: what does this feel like to a five-year-old? Here's where I landed.

Collecting feels like growing. Spending feels like losing.

For a young child, watching a pile grow is the reward. Spending it, even on something nice, means watching it shrink. So nothing in Bili is spent: stickers unlock as a child's star and flower totals grow, and totals never go down.

Motivation isn't a casino

Motivation isn't a bad thing. Scarcity is. No surprise boxes you have to pay into, no "limited time" anything. A reward should reinforce what a child just learned, not keep them tapping.

Show what's coming

Kids love a sticker album because they can see the empty spots and want to fill them. Every locked sticker in Bili is visible, and "Tap to reveal" sits above "Keep playing to earn," so kids always know what's ready and what's next.

The profile hub and the reveal sequence.

Tap the thing, not the button

Most of our users can't read the button labels yet, in either language. So you tap the sticker itself to reveal it, and an animation shows exactly where it went in your album.

The sticker album.

Use numbers they can count

When we tested the rewards, I noticed some unlock goals were 50 or 75 stars, bigger than many of our kids can count. For a preschooler, "a lot" isn't a goal. The next version needs milestones they can see and reach.

A symbol for every meaning

Stars reward right answers. For activities with no wrong answer, like affirmations and family conversations, kids earned hearts, until we needed the heart to mean "save to my favorites." So I designed a flower instead, something that grows, with the message "¡Estás creciendo mucho! / Way to grow!"

The flower: ¡Estás creciendo mucho! / Way to grow!

Rewards design by me, with the Bili team.

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