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LK Weekly: Sprinting to better UX
🕑 Added 2021-10-22 17:32:40 +0000 UTCShaping our Onboarding Sprint
With Example Projects now live (have you checked them out yet?) we are focused on ironing out our main onboarding flows. We want to make sure that we have the right UI design, tutorials, and content to give each new user the best chance of understanding how LK can work for them.
To scope the tasks, we focused on two things:
- Auditing our current onboarding
- Discussing and prototyping Atlas designs
Onboarding tweaks
We are now feeling much more confident about what to focus on to make onboarding amazing. Some of the areas of focus are:
- Welcome email sequences
- A better /help experience
- 2-3 new short tutorials focused on core workflows: Building a new world bottom up, Building a new world top down, and Migrating from other platforms.
- Tons of tiny improvements to UI
Atlas confusion
Our Atlas is a key feature of LegendKeeper, but we've noticed many new users don't clearly understand how it works. For example, it's a struggle to learn that you can nest multiple maps in LegendKeeper, and that every map is associated with a page. We've gone through several ideas to fix this ranging from simple to crazy.
We even prototyped some new UX paradigms. While none of them really stuck due to each having major downsides, seeing the Atlas (or lack thereof) in a new light inspired us with a few ideas. These are experimental and don't indicate LK's actual product direction; it's just good to "flip your painting upside down" every now and then.
Atlas as a "mode-switch" rather than its own thing.
Atlas with its own wiki tree.
We'll be doing something much simpler, but it's good to explore.
Positioning LegendKeeper VS World Anvil
We launched our first competitor comparison page. You can see it at https://www.legendkeeper.com/world-anvil-alternative/
We also created a LegendKeeper vs WorldAnvil workflow speedrun. You can view that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3yvclR3zUI
We didn't do this because we have anything against them. In fact, we wish them and every other worldbuilding app the very best! The reason we worked on this is that we want to improve LegendKeeper's positioning. 'Positioning' is a term that basically means the way LK stands out in the market. We believe we have found our ideal positioning, and writing this page was the perfect exercise to stress test it.
You can expect further changes to our marketing sites in the future to help solidify what makes LK special.
New article on the blog: Yklwa
As part of our ongoing efforts to experiment with SEO and produce content that GMs will appreciate, we released a weapons guide for the Yklwa. It includes the history of the weapon and a nice roleplaying scene so check it out even if you are already familiar with this weapon.
The origins of its name will definitely make you laugh. Let us know what you think!
https://www.legendkeeper.com/dnd-5e-equipment-yklwa/
👻 Ghostbusters
We use Ghost as our CMS. Overall it's an amazing platform, but Adam found it was missing a few things he regularly needs. He started making a Chrome extension called LK Ghostbusters to streamline some workflows.
Here's a GIF of him trying out his "Clean Table" feature. This makes it much faster to copy paste HTML tables from other text editors.
Minor Patches
Braden put out a patch for increasing project creation speed, as well as an experimental fix for a rare, random lockup bug. We'll be observing this in our bug logs to see if it helped at all.
That's all for now, folks! Thank you for your support!
Team LegendKeeper
Comments
LND
I just saw this update a few weeks late, but I’m super surprised you didn’t mention the feature that made me choose LK in the first place: the ability to export your projects off the website, the ability to own your own data and not be tied down to a specific host. LK is easy to try because I can take my work with me when I go. But I want to stay because it’s the only platform that treats me like an adult and gives me the option to leave if things don’t work out. That earns LK a huge amount of trust in my book.
Really appreciate the efforts that go into all these. Creating a positioning page that does a competitor comparison is a difficult thing to balance. Quick recommendation on that comparison page - a table chart of feature types is INCREDIBLY valuable for an "at-a-glance" read. Many people will want to quickly answer "is this the right thing for me?" and they don't want to read the entire page to do so. Having a table with checkmarks and X's of the different feature types which highlights where you think LegendKeeper stands out and provides that entry point to encourage prospective clients to read more.
