AI Childrens Books
2025
As part of a freelance engagement for an early-stage startup, I led the end-to-end discovery design for Live Story Generator, a mobile-first AI storytelling tool that reimagines how families create and share stories together. In a world of fast, passive digital content, the goal was to design an immersive, emotionally resonant experience that inspires kids to read more and empowers families to co-create personalized, multimedia-rich narratives. The project focused on shaping a scalable, culturally inclusive design foundation that could support future development and monetization.
Problem
- Families struggle to find engaging, personalized content that encourages kids to read and co-create.
- AI-generated stories often lack emotional depth, cultural relevance, or personalization.
- Designing a story creation tool that is both intuitive for parents and magical for kids presents usability challenges.
- Upsell opportunities often interrupt user flow or feel poorly integrated in kid-oriented experiences.
Strategy
- Designed for shared use between parents and children, creating meaningful bonding experiences.
- Leveraged reusable “My World” assets to scale story creation and retain emotional context across sessions.
- Ensured flexibility in naming, visuals, and themes to reflect diverse family structures and traditions.
- Maintained a sense of play and simplicity, while handling complex AI functionality under the hood.
- Positioned premium features (animation and music) at natural delight moments to enhance perceived value without disrupting flow.
Solution
- Designed a modular story-building flow using a “My World” library of characters, pets, and locations based on user photos.
- Created an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface for selecting story elements and uploading new ones.
- Integrated smart tagging with suggestions to save characters for future use
- Developed a visual style selector (e.g. Ghibli, Disney, etc) with thumbnail previews to personalize story aesthetics.
- Built a dynamic AI prompt system offering story suggestions with optional custom input for themes and emotional arcs.
- Designed delightful per-page editing features: text tweaking, re-rolling images
- Conceptualized seamless enhancements like video animation and background music, to be explored for future monetization.
Results
- Delivered a high-fidelity concept prototype showcasing an end-to-end magical storytelling flow for families.
- Demonstrated how modular design and smart AI integration can power rich, personalized story experiences.
- Identified key UX moments that foster delight, imagination, and emotional connection between parents and kids.
- Provided a scalable design foundation for further testing, user validation, and future development.
- Reinforced the product’s potential to inspire reading habits and creative expression in children through co-authored narratives.
