“I moved from Ukraine to the US when I was 18. Comic books have been interpreted as a metaphor for the immigrant experience. I think that part really appealed to me.”
Comic book culture runs deep in America, and people connect with it in different ways and for many reasons. Comic book and graphic novel characters have become mainstream in Hollywood recently, and the genre even has literary portrayal from Pulitzer Prize-winning writers.
My grad school colleague, Parminder Kaur, and I chose comic book lovers as a user group to explore a culture we knew little about for a class project. We designed a research protocol, recruited and interviewed a range of comic book enthusiasts and one comic book store manager, and held a workshop with grad school colleagues to unpack what we learned.
We toured participants’ collection of comics-related artifacts and had them draw an “About Me” comic book cover as part of the interviews.
We documented people’s stories and their journeys into the world of comic books, and then for good measure, we attended Chicago’s ComicCon 2013.
Comic enthusiasts of all stripes attended. Many people dressed the part to pay homage to their favorite characters.
We rode the ComicCon shuttle to the convention, and I sat next to a person who showed me his fan art drawing of Leonardo, leader of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Thousands of people attended ComicCon over the course of the weekend, mixing up genres and eras.
Comic lovers’ costumes could get incredibly elaborate, and many people hand-made parts of their costumes.
Many people brought their kids to ComicCon, often in their own costumes.
ComicCon was a great place for fans to show off art that they made, meet their favorite artists, and talk with other enthusiasts about their shared culture.
The Comic Lover’s Journey Map
Customer journey maps are often formatted as a linear graph showing emotional highs and lows across a user’s experience, but I noticed an opportunity to change that paradigm. Our comic lovers research showed how people’s relationship with comics grows and deepens over time, and how the influence of others contributes to that love.
Below is a step-based journey map illustrating the evolution of the comic lover’s journey, and it highlights opportunities for industry to tap into the passion people feel for comics.
We workshopped our findings in our grad program, and it was met with widespread enthusiasm, with several participants suggesting potential commercial paths for further exploration. My colleague and I proposed developing engagements within the Chicago Public Library’s youth programming, which we explored as part of the course of study.
I’d like to reiterate my appreciation for the success of this project to the support of many people and institutions including the IIT Institute of Design, Paul Keck, Helen King, Megan Fath, and most of all, the inscrutable Parminder Kaur.
Project Statistics
Role: Project co-lead, Researcher, Facilitator
Client: This was a project for Storytelling [584], taught by Megan Fath at IIT Institute of Design
Dates: January-May, 2013
Skills and methods: User research · Problem framing · Workshops · Personas · Group facilitation · Communication · Team leadership · Co-creation · Video production · Design Thinking
All images by Russell Flench and Parminder Kaur, except that of the book cover, via amazon.com
Russell Flench 