As UX consultants, we analyze products for a living. But sometimes, our work reveals failures so profound they demand immediate attention. Today, we're examining how Roblox—a platform used by millions of children—failed to anticipate and prevent one of the most serious safety crises in gaming history.
This isn't just a cautionary tale about one company. It's a stark reminder of what happens when businesses prioritize revenue over user safety, when design strategy is an afterthought rather than a foundation, and when the question "what could go wrong?" never gets asked.
In the 1990s, parental concern about video games was straightforward. Parents could see Mortal Kombat's pixelated violence and make informed decisions about what their children played. The danger was visible, tangible, and easy to identify.
Fast forward to 2025, and the landscape has transformed completely. Modern threats aren't visible at a glance. They're insidious, hidden within seemingly innocent platforms like Roblox, where colorful Lego-like avatars mask predatory behavior happening in real-time.
The shift represents a fundamental change in how we must approach product design and safety. As UX design agencies in Nashville and beyond work with companies building digital platforms, we're increasingly confronting a sobering reality: the consequences of poor UX strategy can now include real-world harm to children.
Roblox created a virtual economy using "Robux"—digital currency children can purchase and spend on avatar customization. On the surface, it's a clever monetization strategy that drives engagement and revenue.
But product design consultants know that every feature creates potential attack vectors. Roblox's economy became a mechanism for grooming and exploitation:
The result? Multiple documented cases of child exploitation facilitated through the platform, leading to lawsuits and a massive safety crisis.
As UX consulting firms working across multiple industries, we facilitate countless strategy sessions. One exercise we use regularly is the "pre-mortem"—imagining all the ways a product could fail before it launches.
We have to wonder: Did anyone at Roblox conduct this exercise? Did anyone raise their hand in a meeting and ask:
"Could predators exploit our economy to groom children?"
"What happens when bad actors use our platform for illegal activity?"
"How will we moderate millions of interactions in real-time?"
"What are our worst-case scenarios, and how do we prevent them?"
These aren't comfortable questions. But they're essential questions that strategic UX leaders ask every day.
From our work as UX consultants in Chicago and other markets, we see recurring patterns that explain why critical safety concerns get overlooked:
When CFOs and boards see dollar signs, dissenting voices get silenced. Imagine the meeting where someone pitched Robux: executives seeing revenue projections, celebrating the monetization strategy, planning expansion.
Now imagine someone in the back of that room raising concerns about exploitation. That person often gets dismissed as a "naysayer" or told they're overthinking edge cases.
Design agencies know this dynamic intimately. We're often the people raising uncomfortable questions that stakeholders don't want to hear. But our job isn't to be popular—it's to de-risk products and protect users.
Content moderation is expensive. It requires human beings reviewing millions of interactions, making nuanced judgments about context and intent. It's far cheaper to deploy automated systems and hope for the best.
But as we've seen with YouTube's recent content moderation failures, automated systems create inconsistent enforcement and miss critical safety issues. Bots can't understand context. They can't distinguish between a child testing boundaries and a predator grooming a victim.
UX design agencies working on social platforms understand this tradeoff. Effective moderation requires investment—in technology, in human moderators, in ongoing refinement of policies and procedures. It's not optional; it's foundational.
In traditional software development, safety concerns often end up buried in backlogs hundreds of items deep. Features get prioritized based on business value, and edge cases—even serious ones—get deprioritized indefinitely.
We've seen this pattern repeatedly. A designer flags a potential security issue. It gets added to the backlog. Sprints come and go. The issue remains unaddressed until something goes catastrophically wrong.
This is where UX experts and strategic design leadership make a crucial difference. We have the authority and perspective to escalate critical issues and ensure they get addressed before launch, not after lawsuits.
The tech industry loves the mantra "fail fast, learn quickly." But this philosophy has limits. Some failures aren't acceptable. Child safety isn't an area where you can launch an MVP, gather feedback, and iterate later.
Product design consultants help companies identify which aspects of their products require rigorous upfront planning and which can tolerate rapid iteration. Gaming platforms accessible to children fall firmly in the former category.
Here's a complicating factor that makes content moderation even harder: children are naturally boundary-testers.
Kids will deliberately push limits to see what happens:
This behavior creates enormous noise in moderation systems. It makes distinguishing between:
Automated systems struggle with this nuance. But this challenge doesn't excuse inadequate moderation—it makes proactive planning even more critical.
As UX consultants working with companies building community platforms, we emphasize designing moderation systems that can handle edge cases, understand context, and respond appropriately to different types of violations.
Roblox created a virtual economy using "Robux"—digital currency children can purchase and spend on avatar customization. On the surface, it's a clever monetization strategy that drives engagement and revenue.
But product design consultants know that every feature creates potential attack vectors. Roblox's economy became a mechanism for grooming and exploitation:
The result? Multiple documented cases of child exploitation facilitated through the platform, leading to lawsuits and a massive safety crisis.
As UX consulting firms working across multiple industries, we facilitate countless strategy sessions. One exercise we use regularly is the "pre-mortem"—imagining all the ways a product could fail before it launches.
We have to wonder: Did anyone at Roblox conduct this exercise? Did anyone raise their hand in a meeting and ask:
"Could predators exploit our economy to groom children?"
"What happens when bad actors use our platform for illegal activity?"
"How will we moderate millions of interactions in real-time?"
"What are our worst-case scenarios, and how do we prevent them?"
These aren't comfortable questions. But they're essential questions that strategic UX leaders ask every day.
From our work as UX consultants in Chicago and other markets, we see recurring patterns that explain why critical safety concerns get overlooked:
When CFOs and boards see dollar signs, dissenting voices get silenced. Imagine the meeting where someone pitched Robux: executives seeing revenue projections, celebrating the monetization strategy, planning expansion.
Now imagine someone in the back of that room raising concerns about exploitation. That person often gets dismissed as a "naysayer" or told they're overthinking edge cases.
Design agencies know this dynamic intimately. We're often the people raising uncomfortable questions that stakeholders don't want to hear. But our job isn't to be popular—it's to de-risk products and protect users.
Content moderation is expensive. It requires human beings reviewing millions of interactions, making nuanced judgments about context and intent. It's far cheaper to deploy automated systems and hope for the best.
But as we've seen with YouTube's recent content moderation failures, automated systems create inconsistent enforcement and miss critical safety issues. Bots can't understand context. They can't distinguish between a child testing boundaries and a predator grooming a victim.
UX design agencies working on social platforms understand this tradeoff. Effective moderation requires investment—in technology, in human moderators, in ongoing refinement of policies and procedures. It's not optional; it's foundational.
In traditional software development, safety concerns often end up buried in backlogs hundreds of items deep. Features get prioritized based on business value, and edge cases—even serious ones—get deprioritized indefinitely.
We've seen this pattern repeatedly. A designer flags a potential security issue. It gets added to the backlog. Sprints come and go. The issue remains unaddressed until something goes catastrophically wrong.
This is where UX experts and strategic design leadership make a crucial difference. We have the authority and perspective to escalate critical issues and ensure they get addressed before launch, not after lawsuits.
The tech industry loves the mantra "fail fast, learn quickly." But this philosophy has limits. Some failures aren't acceptable. Child safety isn't an area where you can launch an MVP, gather feedback, and iterate later.
Product design consultants help companies identify which aspects of their products require rigorous upfront planning and which can tolerate rapid iteration. Gaming platforms accessible to children fall firmly in the former category.
Here's a complicating factor that makes content moderation even harder: children are naturally boundary-testers.
Kids will deliberately push limits to see what happens:
This behavior creates enormous noise in moderation systems. It makes distinguishing between:
Automated systems struggle with this nuance. But this challenge doesn't excuse inadequate moderation—it makes proactive planning even more critical.
As UX consultants working with companies building community platforms, we emphasize designing moderation systems that can handle edge cases, understand context, and respond appropriately to different types of violations.
One of our team members experienced a powerful lesson in proactive design while working on an automotive app. The product manager—smart, capable, but new to accessibility—didn't initially understand why accessibility features mattered.
Then they went on a test drive. They watched real users fumbling with the app while driving through Chicago. They saw the safety risks firsthand. That single experience transformed their approach to design.
That's the power of user research and real-world testing. When you see actual people using your product in actual contexts, you understand the stakes in ways that backlog items and stakeholder meetings never reveal.
Did Roblox leadership ever observe children using their platform? Did they watch the social dynamics, the economic interactions, the ways predators might exploit system features?
UX design agencies make this type of research standard practice—not optional, not nice-to-have, but foundational to product strategy.
Major brands—Prada and others—partnered with Roblox to create virtual storefronts and branded experiences. These partnerships lent legitimacy to the platform and drove additional engagement.
But what happens when those brands discover their names are associated with a platform facilitating child exploitation?
This raises critical questions that UX consulting firms help companies navigate:
These aren't just PR questions—they're strategic business decisions that require careful analysis and clear-eyed risk assessment.
As fractional design officers and strategic consultants, here's the framework we would apply to prevent this type of crisis:
Before building new features or launching platforms, conduct thorough audits:
User Feedback Analysis:
Behavioral Analysis:
Competitive Analysis:
UX design agencies know that comprehensive persona development includes modeling not just ideal users, but also threat actors:
Primary Personas:
Threat Actor Personas:
By explicitly modeling threat actors, design teams can anticipate exploitation methods and build preventive measures from the start.
Run pre-mortem exercises asking:
Document every scenario, no matter how uncomfortable. Then design specific safeguards for each one.
Rather than reactive moderation, build prevention into the product architecture:
Economic Controls:
Communication Safeguards:
Content Moderation:
Take a page from the public school system. When users violate policies:
For Boundary-Testing Children:
For Predatory Behavior:
The key is clarity. Users—including children—need to understand that behavior has consequences, just as it does in physical spaces.
Safety isn't a launch feature—it's an ongoing commitment:
Product design consultants help companies build these practices into their operational cadence, not treat them as one-time initiatives.
One of our team members experienced a powerful lesson in proactive design while working on an automotive app. The product manager—smart, capable, but new to accessibility—didn't initially understand why accessibility features mattered.
Then they went on a test drive. They watched real users fumbling with the app while driving through Chicago. They saw the safety risks firsthand. That single experience transformed their approach to design.
That's the power of user research and real-world testing. When you see actual people using your product in actual contexts, you understand the stakes in ways that backlog items and stakeholder meetings never reveal.
Did Roblox leadership ever observe children using their platform? Did they watch the social dynamics, the economic interactions, the ways predators might exploit system features?
UX design agencies make this type of research standard practice—not optional, not nice-to-have, but foundational to product strategy.
Major brands—Prada and others—partnered with Roblox to create virtual storefronts and branded experiences. These partnerships lent legitimacy to the platform and drove additional engagement.
But what happens when those brands discover their names are associated with a platform facilitating child exploitation?
This raises critical questions that UX consulting firms help companies navigate:
These aren't just PR questions—they're strategic business decisions that require careful analysis and clear-eyed risk assessment.
As fractional design officers and strategic consultants, here's the framework we would apply to prevent this type of crisis:
Before building new features or launching platforms, conduct thorough audits:
User Feedback Analysis:
Behavioral Analysis:
Competitive Analysis:
UX design agencies know that comprehensive persona development includes modeling not just ideal users, but also threat actors:
Primary Personas:
Threat Actor Personas:
By explicitly modeling threat actors, design teams can anticipate exploitation methods and build preventive measures from the start.
Run pre-mortem exercises asking:
Document every scenario, no matter how uncomfortable. Then design specific safeguards for each one.
Rather than reactive moderation, build prevention into the product architecture:
Economic Controls:
Communication Safeguards:
Content Moderation:
Take a page from the public school system. When users violate policies:
For Boundary-Testing Children:
For Predatory Behavior:
The key is clarity. Users—including children—need to understand that behavior has consequences, just as it does in physical spaces.
Safety isn't a launch feature—it's an ongoing commitment:
Product design consultants help companies build these practices into their operational cadence, not treat them as one-time initiatives.
Since he personally has no time or social media experience to curate an online presence for it, EVE has helped to start the foundation for an online following onInstagram and Facebook to reach customers Faraj would previously have missed out on.
It is important to recognize that social media marketing is becoming the new norm. While the start up of a social media strategy can be overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be.
While you focus on your passion of running your business, EVE is here to focus on our passion of helping you navigate the social media world and digital business.
Since he personally has no time or social media experience to curate an online presence for it, EVE has helped to start the foundation for an online following onInstagram and Facebook to reach customers Faraj would previously have missed out on.
It is important to recognize that social media marketing is becoming the new norm. While the start up of a social media strategy can be overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be.
While you focus on your passion of running your business, EVE is here to focus on our passion of helping you navigate the social media world and digital business.
One of our core principles as UX consultants is that the two most important words designers can say are "why" and "no."
When everyone else in the room is celebrating a revenue opportunity or exciting new feature, designers need to be the ones asking:
This makes us uncomfortable to work with sometimes. We're not yes-people. We bring data that might contradict board promises. We raise concerns that stakeholders would prefer to ignore.
But this is precisely why companies need fractional design officers and strategic UX leadership. We're not embedded in the day-to-day politics. We can say no without fear of career repercussions. We bring receipts—data from real users—that help executives make informed decisions.
When you hire UX consulting firms, you're not just buying design expertise. You're buying risk mitigation, strategic thinking, and the courage to have uncomfortable conversations before they become crisis management scenarios.
There's a silver lining to this story, and it involves how modern technology can help prevent future Roblox-scale failures.
We've developed what we call the "UX Blueprint"—an AI-powered framework that incorporates safety guardrails, accessibility requirements, and strategic best practices directly into the development process.
Instead of safety concerns ending up in dusty backlogs, they're built into the foundation:
Built-In Governance:
Proactive Rather Than Reactive:
Institutional Knowledge Preservation:
This approach represents the future of UX design agencies—using technology to amplify human judgment and strategic thinking, not replace it.
This conversation isn't meant to demonize video games. Gaming can be incredibly valuable:
The tragedy of platforms like Roblox isn't that they're games—it's that toxicity and exploitation have poisoned spaces that should be safe, creative, and fun.
We remember arcades where communities gathered, where kids learned social skills and sportsmanship. We want digital spaces to capture that same sense of community and joy—but with the safety and moderation that physical spaces naturally provided.
UX design agencies across the country have an opportunity to help build the next generation of gaming platforms—ones that prioritize safety from day one, that make moderation a feature rather than an afterthought, that prove profit and protection aren't mutually exclusive.
If you're building a platform—any platform—that serves vulnerable populations, these principles apply:
You might be thinking: "I'm not building a gaming platform. This doesn't apply to me."
But the lessons from Roblox extend far beyond gaming:
Every digital product creates potential for both benefit and harm. The question is whether you're identifying and addressing the harm potential proactively—or waiting for it to become a crisis.
UX consultants help companies across industries conduct these audits, identify risks, and build prevention into product strategy from the beginning.
Roblox now faces:
All of this could have been prevented with proactive design strategy. The cost of hiring a UX consulting firm for strategic guidance? A fraction of what they'll pay in settlements.
Beyond the financial cost, there's the moral cost: children were harmed. Families were traumatized. Trust was shattered. Those consequences can't be remediated with money or policy changes.
As UX design agencies serving Nashville, Chicago, Detroit, and beyond, we're committed to helping companies build products that serve users without harming them.
We bring:
Strategic Foresight:
User-Centered Research:
Technical Implementation:
Stakeholder Management:
We run workshops specifically designed to identify and address safety risks before launch:
Day 1: Threat Modeling
Day 2: Safeguard Design
Day 3: Implementation Planning
This isn't judgment-free brainstorming—it's structured risk assessment that results in actionable safety measures you can implement immediately.
As product design consultants, we have enormous privilege. We get to imagine and create the digital experiences that shape how people work, play, learn, and connect.
With that privilege comes profound responsibility. What we build affects real people in real ways. When we fail to consider safety, when we prioritize metrics over humans, when we silence uncomfortable questions—people get hurt.
The Roblox crisis should be a wake-up call for every product team, every C-suite, every designer and developer building digital experiences. We can do better. We must do better.
That starts with recognizing that UX strategy isn't a luxury—it's a necessity. That safety isn't a feature you add later—it's a foundation you build on. That the most important question isn't "what revenue will this generate?" but "what harm could this cause?"
Building a platform that serves vulnerable users? As experienced UX consultants, we help companies identify risks, design safeguards, and build products that protect users while achieving business goals.
Whether you're launching a new platform or need to audit an existing product, we bring the strategic thinking, user research, and technical expertise to keep your users safe and your business protected from liability.
Looking for a UX design agency that takes safety seriously? Let's talk about how proactive design strategy can prevent your product from becoming the next cautionary tale.
This article is based on content from the UX MURDER MYSTERY podcast.
HOSTED BY: Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden
EDITED BY: Kelsey Smith
INTRO ANIMATION & LOGO DESIGN: Brian J. Crowley
MUSIC BY: Nicolas Lee
A JOINT PRODUCTION OF EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2025 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden
Email us at: questions@UXmurdermystery.com
“Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.” - Bill Gates, Co-Founder and Technology Advisor of Microsoft.
In today’s tech age, it’s becoming harder, or even impossible, to start a business without going through one or more of the biggest tech companies, namely Amazon, Apple, Facebook or Google.
As UX consultants, we analyze products for a living. But sometimes, our work reveals failures so profound they demand immediate attention. Today, we're examining how Roblox—a platform used by millions of children—failed to anticipate and prevent one of the most serious safety crises in gaming history.
User Experience (UX) research is the key to any well functioning website.
An intuitive and visually appealing interface shapes how users interact with a product, influencing engagement and usability.
