How My UX Design experience helped me with Webcomics

Webcomics, simply put, are comics published on the web to be accessed through a website or a mobile app. Webcomics have gained a lot of popularity over the last five years or so. While comic books are lovely to read and have a massive following, webcomics have their own charm. For creators, webcomics mean zero initial investments and a larger reader base. For readers, webcomics are a cheaper and more accessible option than books.

The fact that webcomics are being published on websites or mobile apps means that they too should follow UX design rules to some extent. This is why a webcomic suddenly becomes a suitable candidate for a User experience case study!

A past failure

My story begins with a failed comic. This particular comic had a decent storyline and good art, but somehow, it was not received well. In fact, it got so much hate to a point one person commented “God what 12-year-old blind kid drew this trash ? awful awful awful drawing”. It was a huge blow to me. After all, illustration was something I always had faith in myself for. I thought that I was good at it.

However, I was bothered by one thing. Was my art really that bad? I have seen comics with arguably worse artwork getting a lot of love. So why the hate on mine?

Is it really the art? Comparison of Usami Akihiko from Junjou Romantica and the MC from my comic. Junjou Romantica is critically acclaimed with 3 Anime Adaptations and over 10 volumes.

Getting into UX

Though I have dabbled in UI Design here and there, in 2017 I decided that I will specialize in UX. The holy grail of UX, in my opinion, is empathy. You always put yourself in the user’s shoes. You follow their journey and figure out their pain points. This is so important that there’s a particular step in the UX methodology for this, called “User Journey Mapping”.

Next, you address these pain points and create your design to fix them. That’s when the rest of the UX process, involving wireframes, mockups, and prototypes comes to play.

When you google for User journeys, you can see so many of them!

Dissecting my past failure

After working on UX, I suddenly felt like my suspicion might be correct. Maybe it wasn’t my art that was bad. Maybe it was something else! So what is it? I decided to re-read my comic and create a user journey. (A reader journey, in this particular case).

And boy, it revealed a lot of things! To name a few,

• The story revolved around two seemingly unrelated protagonists. The jumps between the two were murky, leaving the reader feeling confused.
• In the story, it is revealed that neither of these two “protagonists” was the actual protagonist, but the seemingly mysterious tertiary character! One of the protagonists turns out to be the antagonist, and the other guy turns out to be a supporting character. Now imagine the confusion the reader would face at this point.
• My art might have been okay, but it was never consistent.
• I gave priority to coloring and rendering, but not enough attention was given to the actual facial expressions and poses.

When I put myself in the reader’s shoes, I can totally see why this comic would leave someone confused, frustrated, and upset. However, most people can’t clearly express why they feel these frustrations, and thus they end up blaming the art. The actual problem was that the art was not presented properly! Bottom line: The user experience in this comic was really bad.

All that time spent on shading her hair and not enough thought given to her expression….

A UX-centric approach on the next comic

Thus, in the next comic I did, I decided to go for a different approach. These were some of the fixes I made.

• The comic focuses on one protagonist, who is a person that the reader can stick with from the beginning. (In a darker comic, this person can be the less complicated/ more relatable character). Since the story follows a more linear storyline, there are no jumps at all.
• I used wide-angle establishing shots and words such as “Meanwhile”, “A few hours later”, etc to give the reader the sense of when and where the scene was taking place.
• I decided to follow character design guidelines and have more consistency in art.
• I gave priority to facial expressions and poses, which play a larger role in storytelling.

Facial expressions play a huge part in telling a story!

Additionally, I took the following steps as well.

• Ensure that the comic reads left to right, top to bottom as English readers are used to this particular pattern.
• No speech bubble will have more than two sentences in it. For monologues, I will break the speech bubble into a series of smaller, interconnected speech bubbles for better readability.
• I made the comic more mobile-friendly. The text was no smaller than 14 px and was extensively tested on mobile phone screens before being published.
• Larger, bolder text for louder dialogues, smaller text for quieter dialogues
• I researched about my potential readers and did an analysis on similar comics to get inspired for the look and feel.
• I added breakpoints to the story: Places where I can comfortably stop the story and give some closure to the readers as a risk management technique.
• I decided to upload the comic to a weekly schedule, thus my readers will know when exactly to come online to read it. This makes the comic more intuitive.

Imagine this entire monologue in a single speech bubble….. yikes!

With all these in place, I made my next comic, and it was a big success!

Currently, after a 5-month runtime, my new comic has 60,000 subscribers, which is more than 60 times higher than the number of subscribers I got for my previous comic. It made its way to the staff picks, translated to over 5 different languages, and it has even been pirated on external sites (Which is questionable in all aspects except for the fact that it proves that this comic is well-loved). It holds a 9.4/10 rating (3000 votes) on the same site that gave a 5/10 rating for my previous comic (500 votes). Apart from the popularity, This Fluffy Love has been able to make me earn a monthly income through Patreon and Ad revenue, making it my first comic ever to make any money.

So, what can we take from this?

Let’s equate the precautions I took in this comic to the precautions being taken during an app design.

I think, at this point, it is clear that my experience in UX Design and working on UX-related projects largely helped me with my comic career. Empathizing with my readers, realizing that they don’t know my story unless I tell it to them clearly was a turning point for me.

I think Empathy for users and User-Centric design is not something unique to the design field. Any industry can benefit from thinking more about their audience, listening to them, and empathizing with them. Comics just happens to be one of those industries.