8 minutes reading
In October 2022, through a friend and colleague of mine, I approached Jundo, an innovative startup that makes manga available to read and purchase through its app and web portal.
Although the app was already solid and functional, there were several improvements that needed to be made to take it to the next level, making it easier to use and increasing the ROI from subscriptions and paper sales of the comics.
Together with the project team we structured a process to evaluate the app in all its aspects, questioning assumptions / patterns already defined and designing a new version of the app.
We can summarise the work steps as follows:
UX/UI designer, UX Researcher, Tester
October 2022 - May 2023 (part-time)
UX Research, Wireframes, Design System, Mockups.
Jundo Android, iOS, Web app
Figma, Figjam, Flowmapp
Ivan De Rossi: Jundo CTO
Massimo Miliucci: Senior UX/UI Designer
Lorenzo Carucci: Jundo CEO
At an early stage I worked very closely with my project colleagues to better understand the initial situation and immerse myself in the Jundo reality.
In a second phase I led the UX research, defining all the artefacts we would need to unlock some important insights.
Finally, I rethought the entire Design System according to the new requirements and designed the entire UI of the new app, sharing the improvements and making revisions with my friend and colleague Ivan De Rossi.
At the beginning of each project, I like to understand the context well and empathise with the users, as per the design thinking methodology.
With my colleague Massimo, we therefore prepared two surveys: one for the Jundo team and one for their users. Our main objective was to check what the Jundo team knew about their app/web portal and compare it with the real feelings and user experience of their users.
Are we sure that all users prefer using the app over the web portal? Are all core users male 16-25 years old or will the data show us indications of different segments as well?
The answers received from the two surveys thus confirmed some initial assumptions and revealed some information not previously considered, indicating where to focus our UX research going forward.
Note: here below you can see the whole UX research made on Figjam. Along the rest of the case study you'll see specific screenshots taken from there. Some screenshots don't keep the best quality of detail so you can always refer to this embedded Figjam if you're willing to zoom to the closest pixel of detail :)
In parallel, we conducted a UX/UI audit of both the app and the web portal in production. We then collected screenshots on FigJam of the sections where we identified problems or elements for improvement.
In this way, we were able to familiarise ourselves even more with the Jundo universe and, above all, we gained more trust from the CEO and CTO, who began to open their eyes to issues they had not considered before.
At this point I also created an ecosystem map. This served to put the whole Jundo system down on paper and get a 360° view of how it works and the existing relationships between the various parts (business team, dev team, artists and illustrators, warehouse, technologies used, etc.).
This type of artefact helped me not to overlook potentially important information in my analysis and is a very useful service document for the Jundo executive board.
Through all this preliminary work, we identified some major limitations and rethought the Information Architecture of the app and the web portal.
We used Flowmapp as a tool to track each page and to visualise the flows between the different sections and user journeys. The main elements that stood out and thus needed improvement were:
The research work was then extended and completed with an in-depth benchmarking of Jundo's competitors and the best services for digital content enjoyment.
I focused on the app and my colleague Massimo on the web portal. Some of the major benefits of this further analysis include:
At this point I revised the entire existing Jundo DS for the app following the atomic design approach. I analysed all its elements starting from the foundations to the individual components and ending with macro elements such as bottom sheets and navigation bars.
For each element I created a small documentation, which can be expanded in the future. From a technical point of view, I followed these guidelines when designing the components:
With the new approved Design System, I redesigned all the main flows of the Jundo app. It was 1 month of work at times intense but gave both me and the CTO a lot of satisfaction.
We structured a Figma file with 8 sections, each one dedicated to a section of the app and with all the relevant flows and user journeys inside.
In this way we simplified the consultation of the UI for business reasons or reasoning about new features. As a result, we increased the scalability of the project and facilitated future maintenance.
After a few reviews, in May 2023 the new UI was received with great enthusiasm by the entire Jundo team. Especially because the most important areas of the app have been improved and made more user-friendly. Among the most important are:
The developers have been hard at work since July 2023, and the new version of the app was officially launched on 1 November 2023 at one of the world's biggest comic events, Lucca Comics.
Despite the fact that the current app in production is still being updated (both the CTO and I want the developers to do pixel-perfect work on the designs :D), the new Jundo app has been and continues to be a success.
For example, the app has gone from an average rating of 4.2 to 4.3 in the Play Store, with a corresponding increase in downloads.
The UX/UI restyling of Jundo was a job that allowed me to be involved in the entire design process from A to Z, which is something I am very excited about.
Solid UX research allowed us to lay the groundwork for improving the new app, translating all the insights we found into a scalable Design System and an attractive, functional visual design.
I am grateful to the entire Jundo team for their trust and the good work we have done together. I hope to work again with similar startups and innovative services in the future.
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