Some of the thinking behind Little Legends

Vicky’s written about some of the problems she faced as a mother of young children, and I thought I’d explain some of the thinking behind why we’ve designed Little Legends they way we have.

The main aim is to make good places for kids easier to find. Broadly speaking, there were two possible approaches to this. The first is to make a big online directory, where everything is neatly categorised - a little like a Michelin food guide, but for places for parents rather than for restaurants. And there are a number of sites out there that try to do just that.

This approach had a number of difficulties for us.

1. It meant we’d have to find and review everything ourselves (which is time consuming and costly).
2. Much more importantly, I felt that although we might have a more organised directory, it wouldn’t be as rich. For example, what about the places that only locals knew about? What about other parents’ views on the places? This “top-down” approach tends to miss out all those community aspects, and can suffer as a result.

The second approach is to try to design for this richness from the outset. A great example of this approach working is Wikipedia. For those unfamiliar with the site, Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Rather than source experts for each entry, as an Encyclopedia Britannica might, Wikipedia is built in such a way that anyone can edit or add anything that interests them. There are articles on everything from Mother Nature to the heavy metal umlaut, often in some depth. The results are astonishing - or at least, they continually astonish me. I’ve just had a check, and there are now 1,316,185 articles. Nor is it quantity alone - last December, the American magazine Nature ran some tests and:

“the exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.”

Getting even close to Britannica is pretty darn good. Tapping into this bottom-up approach, and the richness that a community could offer seemed the way forward.

So we set up a wiki, called it Mothershare, and set about creating an “encyclopedia” of sorts for parents. We had enough hits to make us feel that we had piqued people’s interest, but it didn’t really take off.

Among the various bits of feedback we recieved, positive and negative, various pointers stood out:

• it was “a good thing” that it was parent to parent
• it was too daunting a task to add pages from scratch
• it was too “techie” - and people panicked about ruining the site (bless’em!)
• and (crucially) while some of the stuff up there was useful, there was still no easy-as-pie way of find out what was near you.
• Mothershare as a name was too exclusive - what about other people with kids to lookafter, like Dads, babysitters or grandparents?

At which point (this was October 2005), it was back to the drawing board. We found a different name - Little Legends. And we had a think … how could we make the site less “altruistic”? How could we make places easier to find? In short, how could we make the site more useful to parents?

Well, as one Isaac Newton once said, he saw far because he stood on the shoulders of giants. We found some giants, and tried to climb up to at least their toecaps.

• In the beginning …
• Minti Mania
• Online help for stressed-out mums
• Site outage
• Win £100 Cash!

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.