Creativity in user research
Exploring Comics as a storytelling tool to present user research insights
How can I improve the user experience of my user research reports?
As a part of the design process, I always end up creating large consolidated and synthesized journey maps. In order to improve the user experience of stakeholders who receive such user research insight artefacts and reports, I explore different ways this could be made bite- sized to be more impactful and tangible for them to take action. So, for a project when I created the persona and journey map shown below, I wanted to provide a bite- sized insight artefact that would help the team and business stakeholders better understand some painpoints that a large cross-section of our target users go through.
Comics for storytelling
I have hardly met anyone who dislikes comics. They are fun to read, engaging one can breeze through them to grasp the essence of the story. I decided to create a narrative of one of the most important pasts of the user journey here.
Comics look easy but when you start creating them they are many aspects to be considered- flow, story arc, consistency in visuals and so on. I worked on a few iterations where I played around with what I wanted to highlight in the story.
Development of the comic strip
First iteration of the comic strip highlighting major phases and painpoints in a user joruney
I worked on a few iterations to make the storyline crisp and succinct. The final iteration talked about the major painpoints but also visualized what some users expected out of the service and the systems provided by the organisation for these set of tasks.
Final iteration of the comic strip
Feedback and reflections
This was an experiment that I conducted to present user insights to an audience who has never seen a format like this for such a purpose. It was well received by the stakeholders, but I couldn't create more as they require a substantial amount of time and as a user research team of one, some times I needed to priortize on deliverables.
I would definitely experiment more with this medium and recommend others to do the same. There are many places to get inspiration for working with comics for user research, but here some interesting resources to start :
Sharing UX research results with comics : https://uxplanet.org/sharing-ux-research-results-with-comics-f576e861923f
https://www.makingcomics.com/
If you want to dive much deeper, I recommend this book: https://www.bol.com/nl/f/making-comics/38731893/