Overview
In 2016, I worked on the design of Manga Rock for the web, allowing comic readers to read comics on the new Manga Rock source.
My Contribution
Information Architecture
UI/UX Design
Team
1 designer
3 engineers
Year
2016
Recap
Late 2016, after shelving Fuzel Collage, we put all of our resources towards Manga Rock and its derivatives. One of the problems we needed to solve at the time was the unreliability issues that our users complained about when reading the content hosted on external sources, so much that it had swarmed our customer support capabilities. These online sources would be down at any time and users would get upset about it, blaming us and giving bad reviews on the App Store and Play Store. As an aggregator, we had little control over how external sources function. Therefore, we decided that it’s imperative to have our own dedicated source in order to solve this one and for all.
I was promoted to Lead Product Designer and was assigned to lead 3 initiatives:
- Improving the reader-facing issue handling UX in the app
- Catering for the need of content management for our new MR source
- A brand new Manga Rock website for reading comics that utilize this new source.
Due to personnel shortage, I led a part-time designer to come up with the design of Manga Rock for the web. However, he quit halfway so I ended up doing most of the thing.
After some initial research, I discovered that readers on the web are generally more tech-savvy and hardcore than readers on the mobile app, and would check the site more often in a single day. So, the home page would feature an endless scrolling list of the latest updates. Also, this Manga Rock source aimed to be a comprehensive knowledge base for all things comics and manga, so we added support for editorial collections and wiki database such as author, characters…
We needed a user-friendly visual style for this project, and from our success of applying Material Design for Manga Rock Android, we decided to go with Material Design. As there was no official Material Design Web Kit at the time, we had to resort to customizing most of it to fit our needs. The Beta version was launched in November 2016. The visual design was executed in Illustrator. The website enjoyed heavy usage from readers, with the average time spent clocking at 15 minutes.
