Litty: Digital Storytelling Platform
Over 6 months, I led the end-to-end design of Litty, a mobile fiction storytelling platform curated for the modern digital reader. The project spanned research, prototyping, testing, and iterative refinement, designing dual experiences for readers seeking immersive multimedia stories and authors needing publishing, analytics, and monetization tools.
Product Design, UX Strategy
An episode-first fiction app: 10-minute reads with audio and motion, paid by LittyCoins (watch-or-pay) instead of ads.
- Role
- Design lead across reader, author, web, email, monetization, and the design system
- Team
- 1 founder/PM, 3 engineers, 1 illustrator; App Store editorial partner at launch
- Timeframe
- 6 months, kickoff to App Store + Play Store launch
- What I owned
- Reader and author apps, the episode model, discovery ranking, the LittyCoins economy, the web and email surfaces, and the shipped design system.
The bet
The market proved the appetite. The format hadn't caught up.
The share of under-30s reading books has slid for a decade1. The appetite didn't go away. It moved to the phone. While Litty was in design, Naver bought Wattpad and its 72M readers for $600M2, Kakao spent $950M on Tapas and Radish3, and Webtoon crossed roughly 170M monthly readers4. Serialized mobile fiction was publishing's fastest-growing corner, yet incumbents still paced stories like print and paid authors like an ad network: a cut of a pool. Litty's bet made three changes at once. The episode as the unit, multimedia inside it, direct pay instead of interstitials.
Two users, two unmet needs. Readers wanted immersive stories they could finish on a commute, not walls of text. Authors wanted to publish, see what was landing, and get paid per work, not a slice of a pool.
“I mostly read on my phone, but it feels too static. I wish the stories could be more interactive, so I felt more engaged.”
Teardown
Three competitors, twenty-plus interviews, two personas.
I audited Tapas, Webtoon, and Radish screen by screen, then turned interviews into two personas and a journey map tagged with the metric each surface should move.
UX audit + competitor teardown: Tapas, Webtoon, Radish, screen by screen.
Anatomy of a feed that keeps you scrolling: progressive disclosure, mixed image ratios, vanity metrics.
Mapping the cross-surface journey (ads → email → web → app) onto the metrics funnel (reach → view → engagement → subscription).
What shipped
Episode as the unit. Multimedia inside it. Coins, not ads.
Three decisions defined the product. Episode-first: a season breaks into ~10-minute episodes, and the feed serves episodes across stories, so every session has a finish line. Optional multimedia: authors layer audio narration, scroll-triggered motion, and inline art, and readers toggle it on. LittyCoins: readers pay per episode or watch to earn, authors get a transparent per-work payout, and nobody hits an interstitial.
Reader, from left: story detail, the season/episode selector, and the chat-style multimedia reader.
Author, from left: viewership dashboard, comments and reviews, and a mobile CMS to publish and price episodes.
Discovery → wireframes
Ranked the feed, then drew every screen.
Discovery is the growth loop, so I started with a ranking model (recency, completion rate, engagement), then wireframed every reader and author screen before polishing a pixel.
Discovery ranking: how an episode earns its place in the feed.
Reader + account wireframes: browse, read, season select, plans, billing.
Author dashboard wireframes: viewership, audience growth, reviews, tips.
Coins, not ads
Modeled the economy before building it.
Direct pay only works if the economy is legible. I modeled it in two phases. Phase 1, simple unlocks (support a creator for $1, unlock a story for $3.99). Phase 2, a coin wallet with daily refills, tiered packs, and creator support. The shape borrows the wait-or-pay mechanic Kakao's Piccoma proved at scale: pay to read ahead, or wait for the next free unlock. Piccoma rode it to the top of Japan's consumer-spending charts5. Litty's one change: swap the forced ad for an opt-in Watch-to-Play. Earn coins from a video event, or pay. Either way the author gets credited.
Two phases modeled before build: Phase 1 direct unlocks, Phase 2 a coin wallet with refills and packs.
Watch-to-Play: optional events earn LittyCoins, and the unlock screen lets readers watch or pay, never a forced ad wall.
The LittyCoins economy: a transparent store and a wallet that tracks every coin earned or bought.
System & surfaces
Shipped a system, plus the web and email it lives in.
The work didn't stop at the app. A desktop companion mirrors the reader (author profiles, library, chapter reading), and a branded email program carries the funnel: onboarding, story recommendations, and a weekly author report with audience-growth charts. Engineering got a real system to build against: an SF Pro Display type scale, an #FF7300 primary across an 11-token palette, a full component library, and redlined specs.
Web companion: author profiles, story library, and chapter reading.
Lifecycle email: reader onboarding, story recommendations, and the weekly author report.
The type scale, an 11-token color palette led by #FF7300, and pixel-spec redlines.
The component library: chapter cards, reader chrome, inputs, navigation, modals.
What we killed
All-you-can-read subscription would have broken the author contract.
Cut from the build · All-you-can-read subscription
What we tried. A flat monthly unlock for the whole catalog: the Netflix/Spotify pitch. On a slide, the conversion math looked great.
Why it lost. But a pool breaks the promise Litty was selling authors: “your readers bought a coffee for you.” Split a flat fee across a catalog by reading time and one payment dissolves into fractions of a cent. The incumbents we'd torn down were already under fire for creator-unfavorable terms: South Korea's antitrust regulator found 1,112 unfair clauses across 23 of them7. We shipped per-episode LittyCoins instead. A slower revenue ramp, but the supply side stayed, and every author could trace a payout to a reader.
Launch
Editorial pick at launch. Authors stayed.
Litty shipped to the App Store (3.9★, 57 ratings) and Play Store (3.5★) and landed a Featured Editorial pick at launch, the distribution hardest to buy and easiest to lose. Authors stayed through the slower coin ramp because the payout was theirs: per work, and visible.
Next pass
I would have built in-app audio recording.
Two more months
Audio narration was the feature readers reached for most, yet authors had to record in GarageBand and upload a file. That friction cost narration on roughly two-thirds of new episodes. An in-app, one-take recorder would have flipped the default from text-only to voiced, and made the thing that drove engagement the easy path.
- Tidjane
Shipped with
Sources & notes
- 1
Pew Research Center, Book Reading surveys.
pewresearch.org
- 2
Naver acquired Wattpad (≈72M monthly users) for more than $600M, 2021.
variety.com
- 3
Kakao Entertainment acquired Tapas and Radish for a combined ≈$950M (Radish ≈$440M), 2021.
variety.com
- 4
WEBTOON Entertainment reported ≈170M monthly active users, 2024.
ir.webtoon.com
- 5
Kakao’s Piccoma popularized the “wait-or-pay” unlock and rode it to the top of Japan’s app consumer-spending charts, ahead of every game. Industry overview.
inquivix.com
- 6
Self-reported, first months post-launch vs. private text-only beta. Directional pre/post measurement, not a controlled study.
- 7
South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission found 1,112 unfair provisions across 23 webtoon and web-novel providers, 2025.
animenewsnetwork.com
More work
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