Chapter I: Empathize

Prologue

As an avid comic book collector, I found myself spending hours hanging out at the local comic book shop.During that time, I was able to observed the shop's natural flow, daily operations, and customer interactions. It quickly became clear that the lack of a digital presence created significant missed opportunities for both the business and its collectors.A major pain point that stood out was the reselling process. Staff would receive calls regarding reselling and often had to reject the offer outright. Noticing this gap, I decided to take on this challenge.

Challenge: A local comic book shop is losing potential opportunities because they lack an online presence and a digital way to connect with individuals looking to buy or sell their collections.Solution: A single online platform that does two things:
- Give the shop it's much needed online presence
- Offer collectors a simple, dedicated place to list and sell their personal comic book collections to other users.

Chapter II: Define

To understand the core challenges and opportunities for a new platform, I conducted in-person interviews at the shop.I created two distinct sets of interview questions driven by different goals, this was to get a complete picture of the pain points from both consumer and business perspectives.

Based on my user research interviews, I used an Affinity Map to synthesize the qualitative data. By grouping common pain points and key insights, I was able to identify recurring themes and patterns in user behaviors.

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Chapter III: Ideate

Following the synthesis of the user research, the next step was to turn the identified problems into actionable opportunities. Using the "How Might We" (HMW) framework, I developed a series of questions to guide the ideation process and directly address the key frustrations of my three personas.

The Solution

A responsive website for the local comic book shop. The platform addresses the core pain points of both consumers and the business by serving as a peer-to-peer marketplace. This feature provides a trustworthy and user-friendly way for comic book collectors to sell their collections, while also giving customers a simple way to find and purchase both new and second-hand vintage comics.

I created a user flow to guide my design decisions. This served as a blueprint to map out the exact journey a user would take, which allowed me to identify all the necessary screens before I began sketching.

Chapter IV: Prototype

I decided to start this project with a mobile-first approach to ensure a focused experience. By designing for the smallest screen first, I was forced to prioritise the most essential features. My thoughts were that if the platform was intuitive and easy to use on a phone, it would be simple to scale up for larger screens.

Crazy Eights

I struggled the most with the landing page, it was crucial for setting the platform's entire visual and tone. To overcome this I turned to the crazy eights technique and quickly sketched out eight completely different solutions.

Skecthes

By combining the most effective ideas from the crazy eights exercise, I managed to finalised the landing page. This would served as the blueprint for the rest of the platform's pages.

Chapter V: Test

Lofi-prototype

Once the sketches were done, I moved from paper to digital. using Figma I was able to build a low-fidelity prototype. My goal was simple, "get a clickable product ready for user testing. This would allow for gathering usability feedback before locking in the visual elements.