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Our client is a Singapore-based boutique publisher of bestselling children's books. With a goal to make reading and learning fun for kids and engage them in unique ways, the client creates hyper-personalized, interesting, and feature-rich ebooks and books that enable the users to make their own books with pictures. These print-ready design templates allow customers to design their own books and purchase them for their kids or for gifting purposes.
The client had the vision to create a website that would allow users to easily design personalized, animated, and interactive books/ebooks for children. While they had conceptualized the overall website design and some elements, they lacked the technical expertise to fully bring this vision to life. Leveraging our extensive experience in digital publishing and web development, the client collaborated with us for kid's book e-store development from scratch that could allow users to create their own picture books online.
Some key requirements were:
Users should be able to personalize stories by inserting custom names, visuals, audio narrations, etc. with minimum friction
The website needs to provide an intuitive interface to select personalized elements and preview the final output before ordering printed copies
Animations, sounds, music, and text narration need to be seamlessly incorporated into customizable children's books to enrich the reading experience
Our team faced several key challenges in implementation and visualization:
Implementing smooth page transitions and page-flipping effects within the interactive ebooks posed technical challenges for our developers. Careful coordination between the frontend and backend was needed.
When customers entered very long names for personalization, it often led to text spacing, formatting, and alignment issues in the final rendered output.
Users uploading handprint images posed unanticipated challenges if the images captured were not proper or fingers/handlines were not visible. Our algorithms needed to be robust to process poor-quality uploads or ask users to re-upload images if the parameters were not met.
Given the highly interactive and personalized nature of the ebooks, tremendous functionality testing was needed across different browsers, devices, and use cases to deliver a polished user experience.
One key challenge was enabling real-time character customization and showing previews to users. As users selected custom preferences for characters (names, clothes, hairstyles, etc.), our team had to dynamically render the updated characters and insert them into the page visuals.
We were required to generate instant PDF previews for user preview and back-end printing process, ensuring proper formatting across devices, dynamically embedding edits, and delivering good page load speeds.
Identifying the needs of the client, we decided to delegate a team of 6 professionals, including developers, designers, and testers to take up the project.
When designing the website, our top priority was ensuring it accurately reflected our client's conceptualized vision for her target audience of children. Our website designers for children's books carefully crafted each element, image, and placement on the website to completely align with the desired theme and tone. Our designers worked diligently to make the website visually appealing and interesting for kids through intuitive animated and graphical components.
The website was built using a React frontend framework and Laravel for the backend, leveraging our web developers' expertise to create a high-performing website with robust capabilities. Key features developed include.
As a part of the development process, our developers embedded the following book features within the website
We developed custom books that allow users to put a child's name into the story as one of the characters and customize the illustrated character in just a few easy taps and clicks. Users also have the option to preview pages with your customizations before placing an order.
Unique features added to custom books-
We created a functionality that allows users to personalize children's books with photos of their child's handprints. The process works as follows:
To allow customers to preview the final customized book before ordering printed copies, we implemented functionality to generate online PDF previews of the books with the following capability-
Our Q/A testors conducted thorough testing across the entire personalized book creation website, to ensure the smooth functioning of embedded interactive eBook capabilities. The website and interactive eBooks were tested across modern browsers, devices (desktop, mobile, tablet), and operating systems. Furthermore, all flow from user signup to final order review were rigorously tested, and the load times were optimized until we received the desired outcomes.
Impressed with the successful launch of the website, the client is now expanding its operations and working with our team closely on its second phase which involves inviting more authors to sell books on its website, adding more formats and functionalities, and implementing a royalty or subscription-based model.
As more personalized books became available combined with smoother customer experiences, the client saw consistent month-on-month growth in sales revenue and order volume.
The site maintained over 99.95% uptime in the first year with no major outages.
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