Community & Purchasing
In China, purchasing ACG merch can be a troublesome process for ACG lovers (ACG refers to Anime, Comic and Games). First, they need to subscribe to their favorite artists to see if there will be any merch selling announcements on different social media platforms. After the selling announcement, they also need to make a pre-purchase payment and join different group chats to wait for the final payment announcement. Only after the final payment can they finally get the merch they want. This process is both complex and hard to keep up with.
The ACG community & purchasing App we designed aims to unify necessary information gathering and the purchasing process. This app allows users to solve all the problems they may encounter in one place and provides a unique community space for ACG lovers.
Recently, the Chinese ACG (Anime, Comic, Game) culture circle has been growing rapidly. More and more ACG enthusiasts are eager to produce products related to their beloved ACG works. The enthusiasm of the producers also stimulates the buying desire. For example, the ComicUp 29 ACG exhibition that took place just a few days ago attracted ACG lovers from all over the country who came to exchange merchandise. The exhibition traffic reached a staggering number of 159,000 people per day.
Similar conditions exist online. Due to the convenience of the internet, the purchase of ACG merchandise online also has a huge market. However, we found that there is no specific platform solely for ACG lovers to buy and communicate about ACG merchandise. At the same time, as ACG lovers who purchase a lot of merchandise, we noticed that the process of buying a product is too complex, requiring us to use at least three apps to complete a single purchase. In this case, we want to find a way to simplify the buying experience for ACG lovers. We believe that our solution to this problem can help many others who are also troubled by this issue.
Throughout the design process, under Prof. Qian's guidance, we focused on addressing the key problem and listening to our users. By constantly questioning whether we were effectively solving the main problem, we were able to determine our problem structure, which served as our problem-solving goals. Specifically, we aimed to address the information collection needs of our users, which come from two sources: social information, including announcements from artists, merchandise details, and discussions; and trade information, such as pre-purchase and final payments.
We believe that, as long as we combined these two sides’ information into our own app, we have achieved our goal of simplifying the purchasing and communicating process of buying merch.
During the very first class, Rachel proposed the idea of starting an ACG merchandising industry. The initial idea was simple but had several related but non-core issues. Claire, Rosalyn, and Emily all expressed interest in the topic, so we formed a group to work on the project together. By designing the storyboard, we refined the problem we wanted to focus on, which is also the pain point of our project. The pain point we considered was the complexity of the platforms that will be used and the overwhelming amount of information that consumers may encounter.