Our next release Icarus (v0.12.0.0) will ship with a complete re-imagining of how you create resources and connect them in LegendKeeper. This week we hit a dead end on our overhaul to LegendKeeper's UX.
Product development is like a Labyrinth. We thought we had it all figured out, that we were following our golden thread to the center. But as the prototype came to life we discovered we were going down a bad path.
How we'll fix the unified UX shipping with Icarus
Our plan was to completely drop the main navigation bar on the far left side, and have every resource - maps, boards, and wikis - appear in a single, unified navigational tree. Maps would no longer have a connection to a wiki page and would be added freely to the tree as first-class resources.
As Braden got close to the finish line, something felt wrong. He noticed that he would often have to create two resources for every one idea. For example, a map of Red Larch would have also need a wiki page called Red Larch for notes, summaries, or other stuff. This is the complete opposite of our product development philosophy. We want to reduce steps and help you build connected worlds.
The core ideas in Icarus are still feeling great. You can still expect custom properties, way more drag and drop, improved UI details, and more screen real estate. But we needed to change our approach to how maps, boards, and pages were connected to each other. Our new approach imagines every resource in the navigational tree as one idea in your world, with each one getting a distinct tab for its map, board, and other tabs.
Let us know what you think in the #beta-discussion channel in Discord.
Blog Writing Frenzy
We want to make our blog the best in the industry. To help with that Adam has engaged a number of freelancers to help write more in-depth worldbuilding articles. He has also been polishing two important guides to help scale the efforts out further beyond himself.
Our next worldbuilding newsletter should ship next week. It will be the first time we've ever released a newsletter not written by Adam. We are confident it will meet or exceed our quality bar!
We are gearing up to improve both quality and quantity here. We won't be able to do it alone.
Engaging an assistant
In addition to outsourcing some of the writing work, Braden and Adam have started working with a virtual assistant to help with a variety of research and administrative tasks. It's an experiment so it remains to be seen how much it ends up benefitting LegendKeeper.
Our belief is that outsourcing is a crucial skill for self-funded founders and that you can only improve the skill with practice. Our hope is that this will help even more of our time go to core product development and marketing efforts.
Copywriting practice
Adam and Braden re-wrote most of the LegendKeeper homepage this week (changes will be live next week). It was a valuable exercise in copywriting which supported our ongoing marketing studies.
We recently found that changing one line at the top of our homepage improved conversions by 3% - so taking a second look at all the other words was a no-brainer.
Keep your eyes out for the new community section - another small step towards showing off what really makes LegendKeeper special. Please continue showing your amazing work in our #show-and-tell channel in Discord while we work towards making sharing easier later this year.
Making our own maps
Adam wrote a project brief for the team explaining why he thinks LegendKeeper should develop its own map-making software. There's only one small problem... we don't have the team size to split our focus.
Please try to talk him out of this, or if you are a developer of map-making software reach out about a partnership. He has to be stopped.
We'll be at Gen Con
It's official - the LegendKeeper team is going to Gen Con! We had so much fun at PAX, it made sense to get out there again and go to the Big Show.
We won't be doing a booth this year. Our main goal is to connect with other members of the community. If there is anyone you think we should be talking to at the con, please let us know. We'd love to see you!
My love is like a Legend
Adam's daughter drew this. He didn't even tell her to. Should we turn it into T-shirts?
#prouddad
