UX/UI Design
Improving The Spotify K-Pop Experience
The following is a 5-day passion project completed in August of 2021. This includes my zero-to-one process: research, ideation, Figma prototypes, and this case study presentation. One of my career aspirations is to provide a better experience for the rising K-Pop community in the coming years.
K-Pop music has taken over my Spotify activity this past year, and though I am not a fluent Korean speaker, I have found myself immersed in the K-Pop fandom.
(I am not employed by Spotify, nor have I been in the past– this project is just a case study. However, I would be open to the opportunity!)
When I look at Spotify, it is one of my favorite iPhone apps because of its effective user engagement. With K-Pop, Spotify has definitely engaged with its audience by curating their own playlists for the genre (e.g. “K-Pop Daebak” and “K-Pop Rising”).
This has resulted in a large number of K-pop artists paying close attention to this recent trend. For example, top Korean artists are starting to make English only songs (e.g. “Butter” and Dynamite by BTS, “Dance on my Own” by Loona). Additionally, there continue to be ever growing K-Pop collaborations with western artists every year (e.g. BTS & Halsey's "Boy With Luv", Black Pink & Selena Gomez's "Ice Cream).
This would indicate that although they do not speak or understand the language, people are eating up K-Pop in the U.S. However, the English-Korean language barrier does exist in the U.S. There are also additional cultural differences that are significant as well.
I decided to take a zero-to-one product design perspective and ask the question: "how might we improve Spotify's user experience for international (non Korean speaking) K-Pop fans?" I will start by creating a list of pain points that someone who does not speak Korean may encounter as a fan of K-Pop.
Now that we have a list of pain points, let's define our problem by using "How Might We" questions:
I have found that the K-Pop fan community have created their own solutions to address the Korean-English language barrier. One really successful solution is often labeled as "Color Coded Han/Rom/Eng", which provides the following four elements at the same time to accompany a song:
Examples of this solution can be found in YouTube videos or lyrics webpages–I will highlight a couple examples below.
These videos are fan-made, but highly successful. For example, BlackPink's official music video for DDU-DU DDU-DU" has 1.6 billion views (the second-most-viewed music video ever in the first 24-hour period). A fan-made Color Coded Han/Rom/Eng Lyrics video for this song has 73 million views over 4.5% of the original music video!
Here is another type of lyric video that is pretty popular on YouTube, focused on showing a song's distribution of lines between a group's members.
These videos have a niche of providing "lyric distribution" between members, but it also uses a "messenger app" perspective to show the lyrics. It has slick animation and has a great use of typography for its Han/Rom/Eng color coded lyrics, providing an overall aesthetic visual experience. The visual design here will be an inspiration to draw ideas from later on.
http://colorcodedlyrics.com/ is a community-run website that provides lyrics in 3 columns: one for Hangul, one for Romanized Korean, and one for English translation (just like the Youtube videos mentioned above).
The community for this website is quite impressive– contributors are volunteers and there are still updates almost every day for new music releases in the K-Pop world.
This lyrics website and the fan-made YouTube content mentioned earlier show the demand for Han/Rom/Eng and the desire to for English speaking K-Pop fans to connect their favorite songs. However, for people who primarily use services like Spotify to listen to their music, the above solutions still require accessing a YouTube video or a lyrics website. Is there incorporate something like this within the Spotify mobile app?
Spotify already uses a "Behind the Lyrics" feature for a good amount of popular songs. However, "the lyrics currently appear below the song window courtesy of Genius but are continually interrupted by bits of trivia about the song."
There are also news articles that say that Spotify is working on a syncronized lyrics feature. There is also this image in Spotify's help documents that shows a live-sync lyrics feature.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be a universal feature right now. My iPhone Spotify app does not have it. Even so, I decided to go one step ahead and design a lyrics feature specifically for K-Pop.
I hopped on Figma and designed a feature that would help make K-Pop music more lyrically accessible for those who don't speak Korean by taking inspiration from the Color Coded Han/Rom/Eng Lyrics mentioned earlier. Below is the result:
Here is an GIF of the animated prototype:
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A YouTube lyric video has a few setbacks on a mobile device. First of all, it is not responsive to a mobile screen in portrait orientation. Second of all, watching a video requires a lot of data– which can be expensive or unreliable when wi-fi is not available.
The solution to the aforementioned problems is not only mobile friendly, but requires little to no data to use when compared to a YouTube video. The only data that is required are the lyrics (all text), a profile picture of each singer/rapper of the song, and a markup text system to indicate who is singing which part.
The majority of popular K-Pop artists are boy groups or girl groups. Although Spotify has a design for artist biographies, it does little to feature the members within a K-Pop music group. This is extremely detrimental as the individual personalities within a music group play a pivotal role in the overall allure of the K-Pop– idol culture! In addition to creating unique music and performing complex choreography, K-Pop stars are often making content for fans to be featured on variety shows or live streams. What changes could Spotify implement in order to better feature these individuals?
There is a popular website called kprofiles.com– it's kind of like a wiki for K-Pop artists. Similar to colorcodedlyrics.com mentioned earlier, Kprofiles is a community-started project. Started in 2016, it has the goal of "bringing comprehensive profiles of Korean pop idols, bands and actors." It now has 150 contributors (authors and editors for the site) and even collaborate with Korean entertainment companies to obtain accurate information. The site provides lots of fun facts and details to highlight the individuals, not just the group.
To address the lack of content available that highlights the individual members within a K-Pop group on Spotify, I put together this prototype on Figma:
Inspired by kprofiles.com and wiki-sites, this profile page was designed with the Spotify-look in mind. There is also a feature of "photocards", which will be explained later!
The thumbnails, displayed at the top of the screen, are a component that will be used to access the other profiles.
These thumbnails will be incorporated into the artist's home page (below, left), and the artist's "About" page (below, right).
The member biography page currently does not exist on Spotify, but could be a great inclusion in order to increase fan engagement.
It has almost come to be expected for new k-pop albums to include multiple versions. These variations may include things such asalternative album covers featuring different art and photography concepts.
Below is a simple Figma prototype that incorporates different album covers into Spotify's already existing design. Though it may seem like a minuscule inclusion, these changes are monumental in elevating the overall fan experience as they now have access to additional special album concepts the artists have worked tirelessly to create.
Photocards are very popular K-pop collectibles that are on the same level of desirability as other popular collectables, such as sports trading cards or Pokemon cards. When buying a physical album, the purchaser will also receive a few photo cards that are randomly selected from the full collection.
Returning to the Member Profile Page we designed above, there was actually a "photocard" feature added. Take a look below.
Spotify has the name brand to collaborate with Korean entertainment companies. Working with artists to create digital "Spotify exclusive" photocards could not only bring more attention to the K-Pop artists, but also bring more fans to the Spotify platform.
The above would complete an iteration of the zero-to-one design process. We defined that improving the K-Pop Spotify experience would involve mitigating the language barrier, connecting fans to individual group members, and incorporating more aspects of K-Pop fandom culture. Drawing inspiration from popular fan-made websites, videos, and projects, we designed solutions on Figma for the Spotify mobile app.
I would love to be given the opportunity to present these particular features to Spotify and see how it can be incorporated into both the company’s mission and goals.
Additionally, I can start the one-to-end UX design process, which includes doing more user research, enhancing the above prototypes, and user testing.
I hope you enjoyed this case study. Feel free to reach out if you have any feedback as I would love to hear it.
