Why Dreamify asks for a nickname, not a name

A bedtime story with the child's name in it is the whole point of Dreamify. A children's app that collects children's names is something we wanted to think very carefully about. The answer we landed on is small and we think it matters: we ask for a nickname.

What the story needs

Something to call the hero. "Lily" works. "Bug" works. "The little captain" works. The story engine does not care whether it is on a birth certificate. So we ask the parent what the child likes to be called in stories, and we say exactly that on the screen.

Why it is more than a label

Asking for a nickname rather than a name changes what the parent gives us. It also changes the feel of the setup: it is playful rather than administrative, and it signals that this is a story profile, not an account.

The same rule everywhere

• Age in years, not a date of birth. The story needs to know roughly how old the hero is. It does not need a birthday.
• Favourites, not a profile. Animals, toys, places, things the child loves this month. These go into the stories and nowhere else.
• Topics to avoid, which the parent writes in their own words and which the engine treats as a hard rule.
• No photos of the child. Illustrations are generated from the story, not from a face.

The parent owns it

The profile is created and controlled by the parent, in the parent's area of the app. It can be edited at any time and deleted in one tap, with the stories that used it. We do not knowingly collect anything directly from a child, and the design makes that the natural path rather than a rule we enforce afterwards.

What this cost us

A little personalization. A date of birth would let us write birthday stories automatically. A photo would let us put the child's face in an illustration. We decided those were not worth what they would mean for the data we held. We would rather have a slightly less magical app that a parent can trust completely.