How we made personalised story app, Mr Glue Stories | App story
Five years ago I was going through the “Why can’t I get my child reading?” conundrum with my daughter, Helen, who had many better things to do at the time, such as sploshing paint about, dressing up and persecuting the cat.
While having friends around for dinner, Helen joined the adult conversation after hearing the older children talk about school essays. She proclaimed that she needed one, so, seeing this as a great opportunity to get my five-year-old daughter engaged in literacy, I got to work and created a personalised story.
The story was a silly Arthurian quest for pink frilly dresses with knights and damsels in distress, and a wolf who turned out to be an enchanted fashion designer called Alexander (luckily, Merlin was able to sort out the wolf problem and then it was fabulous clothes all round). Helen ran around the house clutching the story to her chest. She was enormously excited because it was hers. It was at this point that we really started making headway with her reading skills.
This was the lightbulb moment for our reading app, Mr Glue Stories. Wouldn’t it be great, co-founder Carrie Gregory-Hood and I thought, if we could create a product that allowed children to create their own personalised stories.
For some children it’s quite a business getting into reading. It’s not necessarily that they’re not able to, they’re just not interested, which can hold them back in school and later on in life. Save the Children’s Read on. Get on campaign, launched earlier this year, recognises this is a major issue in the UK.
First, we looked at what was out there already. There were quite a lot of personalised story tools and apps, but most of them were along the lines of: put your child’s name into this classic. In other words, something given to a child by an adult.
We wanted the opposite of that: to involve the child in the process and put them into the driving seat of the story. We wanted them to be not just the main character and choose details as they read, but the illustrator and the voiceover artist as well, all at the same time.
An app was the only way that was going to happen, so we mapped out the features of the app, raised some finance from friends and family, set up a limited company and set about writing the first series of stories.
We then went on a two-woman mission to attract the top talent as contributors to our product. Mr Glue Stories needed the best so, through our contacts, we got to work in sourcing an amazing illustrator and a tech development company, as well as connecting with a local school who kindly offered their voices for our story app. Our business was born.
Mr Glue Stories is, we like to think, the next-generation in personalised storytelling. The book is designed to be personalised on an iPad by the child themselves, rather than done as a series of data points by parents and presented as a finished book to the child. It’s an engaging and immersive reading experience because not only do the children choose characters and elements to go into the story, they can also colour in and draw on every page, as well as record themselves reading and add music and sound effects as they progress. The app allows them to make their very own custom book and in the case of some children, it takes away the fear of the published page.
An app such as this is not without its challenges. The biggest for us by far was actually sourcing tech developers: finding ones that were on the same wavelength and who understood the vision, were reliable, knew their stuff and didn’t want to steal our IP. We lost nine months at the start dealing with a number of tech developers that fell down on at least one of these.
Mr Glue Stories
Another huge challenge for us was developing a user experience (UX) that worked for children globally, as was creating a whole new rendering engine that compresses enormous files that could be pulled out on demand. We had to make sure the app didn’t use up all the iPad’s memory resources
Without any marketing, we achieved more than 11,000 app downloads within the first six months of launching on the App Store. We’ve been awestruck by the positive reaction from parents and teachers, who see children enjoying reading experience.
What next? The future for Mr Glue Stories will be linking up our content management system – where new stories have been created – to the app, which will give children the opportunity to access new stories (topics/themes), add new characters and build up a personalised collection of storybooks. While we’ll always ensure a selection of these stories remain free, additional ones will be available as an in-app purchase. We also want to reach out to more parents and teachers than any other app or personalised storybook in the UK.
App facts
Length of the project: nine months internal planning; one year development; three months development for printing
Companies involved: Leto
Size of the team: five developers, one art director and a team of project managers
Amelia Thorne is co-founder of Mr Glue Stories with Carrie Gregory-Hood
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