Comics for UX design

What do comics have to do with product development and innovation? In the past year, our US and Japanese clients — including an industrial power business, a cloud storage startup, and the world’s largest social network — have told us that our comics are some of the most effective and viral UX research deliverables.

Social Models’ comics help our clients rally their organizations for user-centered design. In fast-paced business and engineering environments, visual story-telling provides the greatest impact for insights gained from UX research.

Visual storytelling

Some UX colleagues also seek visual impact with large format posters and edited video, tools to align customer research insights with product concepts, design, and testing. Social Models has also experimented with photo stories.

COMICS ARE UNIQUELY SUITED TO PERSONAS, MASCOTS, AND SCENARIOS. COMICS ENGAGE DEEPLY AND GO VIRAL.

To print life-size posters for personas, a client showed us an example using stock photography. Frankly, the stock portraits lacked authenticity and excitement. It is almost impossible to find the right images to convey new research insights and to inspire viewers.

More human

Instead of generic images for these life-size posters, Social Models’ illustrator in Tokyo quickly designed a set of four characters that introduces relevant use cases, behaviors, and goals. The colorful and unexpected comics quickly spread within the organization, leading to many more requests for user-centered product design.

Social Models creates comics for clients to spark empathy, discuss uncomfortable situations, and build a vision around innovative solutions. Comic personas convey emotion, style, and scenarios, while also allowing space for viewers to add their own imagined details onto the sparely drawn figures.

More engaging

No one likes to hear bad news. Comics can provide the humor necessary to confront less-than-ideal, or legacy experiences. By showing current and future states, comics engage and inspire cross-functional teams of business strategists, engineers, and product managers.

A comic mascot is a friendly and memorable ambassador for change. A mascot engages our emotions, and creates empathy for the customers and workers who will be using our systems and services.

Emotional and practical

Comics can also solve practical issues in UX research. When asking non-tech users to set up a home research lab at the end of a month-long, online photo journal, a comic illustration provided a needed overview of how all the pieces fit together. Distributing the comic increased the success rate for a home lab that required two cameras to record research participants and their smartphones.

All images by Tokyo illustrator and printmaker Shu Kuge. Please contact us at Social Models.