What We Shipped This Week at Little Legends: Quality & Polish

A man who has spent any time in the company of children knows they will forgive a great many sins, but an inconsistency is not among them. Tell a child her hero wore a red coat on page four and a blue one on page five, and you will be cross-examined with a severity no courtroom lawyer could muster. This week we devoted ourselves to removing such provocations — smoothing the small frustrations and raising the quality of what comes out the other end.

On the matter of wandering wardrobes. Our storybook characters had developed the regrettable habit of changing outfits between pages, as though each illustration were a fresh social occasion. Parents and other supporting players, meanwhile, drifted in and out of resemblance to themselves. We have put a stop to it: outfits now stay locked from cover to cover, secondary characters receive proper descriptions that hold for the whole tale, and the camera has acquired some judgment besides — drawing close when the moment is tender, stepping back when there is running and jumping to be shown, and no longer cropping a hero off at the ankles as though feet were a luxury. Toddler books were also coming back shorter than a toddler's patience deserved, so we raised the word budget and instructed each page to be rich without cramming in more events than one picture can honestly hold.

On emails that know whom they address. The notices we sent to parents had been greeting children as "Ayla +1," which is how one addresses a wedding guest, not a protagonist. The emails now greet your child by name, list the cast naturally — "Kyler, Daddy and Mommy" — and lead with a subject line worth opening: "We're crafting [child's name]'s story."

On books that follow their owners. Formerly, a book begun as a guest on one device was wedded to that browser for life, and a family that switched phones lost the whole affair. Now your book follows your email address — across devices, sign-ins, and cleared browsers alike. Give us your email once during generation, and the book is yours to recover whenever you come back.

On checkout. We retired the Board Book option to concentrate on the formats we trust — Paperback and Digital PDF — and we evicted the support chat bubble from the payment page, where it had taken to sitting atop the form fields at precisely the wrong moment.

On confidence. We added a full end-to-end test suite covering the road from landing page through checkout, so that everything fixed above stays fixed, and everything we ship next arrives already inspected.

Next week: eval calibration and a new model pilot, to push story quality further still.

— Mark Twain