MCNA Kids Zone

MCNA Dental is one of the largest dental insurers in the country for government-sponsored Medicaid and CHIP programs. Kids Zone is the part of their site built for the children actually covered by those plans, and it needed reimagining. I was on staff.

The audience was defined as ages 0 to 18 — which is not one audience. Leadership liked the idea of a dental-themed park; I pushed it further and pitched an underwater one, with three themed islands and an ocean mascot guiding each, holding games, videos and a library. That's the version that got built, and I designed it out from the characters to the flyer handed out in dental offices.

• Zero to eighteen is not an audience, it's three. What a four-year-old can operate, a nine-year-old finds babyish, and a teenager won't be seen using. One site had to give each of them somewhere to go without embarrassing any of them.
• A dental insurer has to be trustworthy to the parent and fun for the child at the same time. The people choosing the plan and the people using this site are different people with opposite expectations of what a health insurance company should look like.
• Educational games are usually one thing or the other. Something like Plaque-Man has to be a real game first — if it isn't fun, the dental hygiene message never gets delivered, because nobody plays it twice.
• Mascots have to hold up under repetition. A character that reads well once has to survive being the guide across an entire section, at every size, next to type a child can read.
• The system had to leave the screen. The same world needed to work as a promotional flyer for dental offices and events, and as banners on MCNA's main corporate site, where the audience is adults.

1. Pitched the concept, not a layout. Proposed the underwater theme park as the organizing idea for the whole site — which is what made the sections feel like places rather than menu items.
2. Designed the mascot cast. Developed the ocean characters through iterations before landing the finals, each one guiding a themed island.
3. Built three themed islands. Games, videos and library, each with its own character guide and its own visual territory inside one world.
4. Designed and illustrated the games. Plaque-Man, an interactive coloring book, an illustrated puzzle activity, a word scramble and a word guessing game — fully illustrated rather than skinned templates.
5. Designed the video box office and theater. A place to watch rather than a list of links.
6. Built out the library. Page content and header imagery for the reading section.
7. Took the world off the screen. A promotional flyer for dental offices and events, and banners carrying Kids Zone onto MCNA's main site.

• Kids Zone launched as a designed place rather than a page of links — games, videos and a library, each with its own character guide.
• The site is still live and still running this design at kids.mcna.net, years after launch.
• Dental offices had a printed piece to hand families, extending the site into the waiting room.