MSc Dissertation: Comics reading app

The problem in plain sight

Anyone who reads comics digitally knows the frustration, even if they've never put it into words. Your collection is split across multiple platforms, your phone isn't the right shape, and the panel-by-panel reading mode that's supposed to help, strips away exactly the peripheral context that makes a comic page work.

This isn't a niche complaint. It's a structural problem with how the industry moved online and one that had been almost entirely overlooked in HCI research relative to e-reading more broadly. That gap was the starting point for my MSc dissertation.

My research question was straightforward: why is reading comics digitally such a frustrating experience, and what would a better one actually look like?

Understanding the space

Platform	Library Size	Device Support	Downloads (Android) ↓	Rating (Android)	# of Reviews (Android)	Rating (iOS)	# of Reviews (iOS)	Payment Model
WebToons	/	Android, iOS, Web	50,000,000	★★★★★	1,758,748	★★★★	47,600	Free
ComiXology	100,000	Android, Kindle, iOS, Web	10,000,000	★★★★	59,879	★★★	185	Per comic
MangaToons	/	Android, iOS, Web	10,000,000	★★★★	496,413	★★★★★	3,300	Free, Own currency
WebComics	/	Android, iOS	5,000,000	★★★★	201,196	★★★★★	60,900	Free
Cruchyroll Manga	/	Android, iOS, Web	1,000,000	★★	31,361	★★★	1,300	Subscription
Dark Horse Comics	3,500	Android, iOS	1,000,000	★★★★	12,600	★★★	45	Per comic
DC Universe Ultimate	25,000	Android, iOS	1,000,000	★★★	15,648	★★★★★	57,700	Subscription
Izneo	2,200	Android, iOS	1,000,000	★★★	4,066	★★★★	197	Subscription
Marvel Unlimited	28,000	Android, iOS, Web	1,000,000	★★★★★	425,538	★★★★★	4,300	Subscription
Shonen Jump	10,000	Android	1,000,000	★★★★	5,885	★★★★★	85,200	Subscription
Tapas	92,000	Android, iOS	1,000,000	★★★★★	70,897	★★★★★	25,200	Free
WeComics	/	Android	1,000,000	★★★★	60,103	★★★★★	1,900	Free
Manta Comics	/	Android, iOS	500,000	★★★★	6,842	★★★★★	4,300	Free
VIZ Manga	4,000	Android, iOS	500,000	★★★	2,884	★★★★★	34,300	Free
INKR Comics	/	Android, iOS	100,000	★★★★	2,382	★★★★	869	Free
Madefire	/	Android, iOS	100,000	★★★★	3,469	★★★★	245	Per comic
Bilibili Comics	/	Android, iOS, Web	30,000	★★★★	361	★★★★★	5	Free
GoComics	/	Web	0	n/a	0	n/a	0	Free, Per comic

Listening to users

The platform analysis told me what was broken. Six semi-structured interviews told me why it mattered.

I recruited dedicated comic readers — people with established habits and real collections — and ran a pre-screener questionnaire to identify participant behaviours. The interviews were thematically analysed to surface patterns, and those patterns were distilled into two personas:

These two people have different problems, but they share a common frustration: no single platform serves them well enough to make digital comics feel like a natural choice over physical ones.

From the interviews, I developed ten prioritised design requirements — the constraints ZAP! would be built against.

The design process

Information architecture

With requirements in hand, I sketched out information architecture options and ran a remote card sort to validate the structure with real users. The results were instructive: "Store" won out as the label for the discovery section — and "Serendipity" got an honourable mention, which neatly confirmed that discovery as an experience was a genuine user need, not just a functional requirement.

From sketches to prototypes

The design work moved through concept sketches on paper, then low-fidelity wireframes, and finally a high-fidelity interactive prototype. The app is tablet-first — a deliberate choice based on the research, which confirmed that phone reading meant constant zooming while tablets more closely match the proportions of a comic page.

The key screens covered:

• Onboarding and setup flow — connecting existing accounts and importing a library
• Library view — with a filter panel for managing a large collection across series, publishers, and format
• Store / recommendations view — built around discovery as a first-class experience, not an afterthought
• Comic listing page — issue-level information and reading continuity
• Reading UI — the most considered part of the design

The reading UI

The reading UI is where ZAP! made its clearest design argument. Panel-by-panel mode — the standard approach across most platforms — was consistently criticised in the research. Readers don't experience a comic as a sequence of isolated panels; they experience a page, with peripheral context that informs how they read each panel. Stripping that away might solve the zoom problem, but it creates a different, arguably worse one.

ZAP! kept the full page view as the default and solved navigation differently. The visual scrubber — inspired by video editing timelines — sits at the bottom of the reading UI, giving readers a filmstrip-style overview of the issue that lets them jump and orient without ever losing their place. It was an original interaction concept that directly addresses a gap I'd identified in the platform comparison: not one of the three major platforms had solved issue navigation in a satisfying way.

The aggregation question

An early ambition for ZAP! was true cross-platform aggregation — one place to access ComiXology, Dark Horse, and your local library all at once. That hit a wall quickly: most comic platforms have closed ecosystems with no open APIs.

Rather than abandon the concept, I made a deliberate call to design for the ideal future state anyway. The aggregation model is architecturally present in ZAP!, and the research clearly establishes it as a genuine user need. Whether it's technically realisable today is a separate question. Designing to the need rather than to the current technical constraints felt like the intellectually honest move — and it's a stronger design for it.

Evaluation

The high-fidelity prototype was evaluated through three moderated remote user tests (plus a pilot session), with a SUPR-Q questionnaire at the end of each.

The overall reception was positive. Participants found the visual design clean, the information hierarchy logical, and SUPR-Q scores were strong on comfort, aesthetics, and willingness to recommend.

The issues that surfaced were as useful as the praise:

1. Search dominated every session. Every participant went to the search bar first for everything — and the prototype didn't fully support that behaviour.
2. Iconography in the reading UI caused confusion, particularly in the navigation controls.
3. Custom group management didn't match users' mental models. The interaction design needed more work.
4. Horizontal scroll affordances weren't obvious enough in a mouse-based remote testing environment — a testing issue rather than a real design flaw.

Reflection

The thing I'm most proud of isn't any single screen — it's the coherence of the process. Each phase genuinely fed the next. The literature validated what the platform analysis found. The interviews validated both. Every design decision in the prototype is traceable back to a specific requirement. That kind of end-to-end rigour isn't something you can retrofit.

If I were doing it again, I'd recruit earlier and more broadly. Six interview participants and three test participants — all male, mostly British, mostly in a similar age range — is a real limitation, and the dissertation is honest about that. A more diverse sample would have stress-tested the design assumptions considerably harder. I'd also push further on prototype fidelity in the areas that mattered most for testing: search and group management both needed more depth to be properly evaluated.

But the scrubber still holds up. The aggregation argument still holds up. And the problem — the genuine, frustrating gap in how digital comics are read — absolutely still holds up.