Mangas.io
Raphaël Régnier
I have been the principal product designer for Mangas.io since 2020, driven by my interest in manga and the challenges of a B2C entertainment interface, as well as because my brother founded the company after 2 years of market research.
There is too much to say about all the decisions made over years of work—every button every new feature. So, I will summarize the main challenges and their impact.
Challenges over 3 years
Branding the whole business
Design of the responsive web application
Design of the cross-platform mobile application
Continuous creation of visual formats for the platform and promotion for stores
Print creations
Managing 2-3 creative profiles working in tandem for asset creation
Allowing navigation and designs to be highly replicable for SEO purposes.
Proposing evolutions that meet user expectations: user interviews, implementing features to facilitate product feedback
The world of manga is primarily visual, so the responsibility of design is paramount to highlight the works as much as possible without distracting the user
Enabling the discovery of new content: Adapting the interface to accommodate more content: offering personalized titles based on past readings, reading lists, etc.
Simplifying developers' work as much as possible by implementing a design system and clear guidelines, and avoiding adding unnecessary elements that users do not request. Essentially, users want to discover new mangas and read titles with the most facilitating interface possible (reading modes, resume, history, etc.)
The operational part for graphic creation:
Setting export format compression
Multiple operational Figma projects management with specific purposes for each vertical: graphics, marketing, UX, UI, research, drafts etc.
Setting up a multi-step system to manage the validation of visual creations with rights holders and publishers in Japan. For example, a visual for Naruto can take 30 days to be approved for publication on the platform! If you frame a character poorly or spoil the story... rejection: back to 30 days!
Setting up templates on Figma to speed up the creation of posts on social networks (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter), and to align existing formats on the application for validation by rights holders
Setting guidelines for graphic designers creating visual assets for the titles
Evolving the platform to initially host 50 titles and scale to more than 1000 titles = 100k+ chapters
Impact
Scaled licenses from 50 to 1000+
Scaled user base from zero to 8000+ paying monthly subscribers
The design system has remained unchanged for 2 years, maintaining brand coherence between the web and mobile applications
The graphic workforce has adapted to the volume of new titles arriving on the platform, with a clear creation and validation process by rights holders
Mangas.io raised more than 4M€ between 2020-2023, and is now (late 2024) moving towards their Series B round, with lots of new things I’ll be working on but can't reveal yet!
4,4 ⭐️ Appstore based on 246+ reviews
4,6 ⭐️ on Google play store based on 764+ reviews, 100K+ downloads
Around 40k daily visit on the desktop platform only
Screens of my work over the years:
Thanks for reading it all!
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Posted Sep 24, 2024
Artistic direction, web and mobile app UX/UI design from scratch. On-demand french mangas reading service, top 1 in France.
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