Previously in K-pop history, most K-pop artists used a Korean web service called Fan Cafe operated by famous Korean web portal called DAUM to communicate and interact with their fans. This was OK until Kpop group BTS became a global sensation and since then, problems started to emerge from both global fans and BTS’s music agency, HYBE Entertainment on using Fan Cafe as an official fan club website for BTS. 

Before building Weverse, I first looked at the problems that each of these user groups were facing to help me get started. 

I participated in identifying existing user journey of official fan club website and realized that one of the biggest problems international fans were facing was on language barriers which made it very hard for them to get involved with the community. This research helped our team focus on building a platform that can be used by fans from around the globe and also gave us insights on how we could lower the entry barrier to joining the service. 

I took part in drawing out three main keywords from research insights to define our service UX strategy and main features. Throughout continuous enhancing of our features, we were able to build a successful fandom platform used in 233 countries.

This project had only 4 months work period, and even though we were on a tight schedule, as a team we created a design system to increase work efficiency between designers and developers, to provide users with consistent experience for all Weverse branded platforms for usability, quality and reliability.

I conducted developing design pattern library on Sketch, and after the release, I suggested and collaborated on documenting our design system through a collaborative documentation site called, Zeroheight.

Home Screen act as a gateway to enter individual artist community. For the initial release, number of artists that joined Weverse was limited, so as a design team we had to think of a way to make Home look live and engaging. I contributed to idea of showing each artist community in a Card UI to be shown in carousel sliders focusing on promoting each individual artists.

Each artist community consists of individual ‘Feed’, which is made up of ‘Posts’ that users upload. During the research phase, we realized that unlike Korean fans usually liking one artist at a time, International fans outside of Korea tended to like multiple artists at same time. Understanding these characteristics, we decided to design community feed allowing users to switch between multiple artist communities with tap of a button, by providing dropdown button next to the artist name that’s located on the Community Header.

Fans can stay in touch with artists and their latest updates through ‘Moment’, which is a feature like Instagram Story where artists can share their stories with their fans. I fully contributed to designing this feature, allowing fans to reply and cheer for Moment for 24 hours.

To encourage artist to communicate often with their fans, if artist hasn’t uploaded any Moment within 7 days, I designed a reminder banner asking artist to say ‘Hi’ to their fans on top of the feed screen which leads to Moment Editor when artists clicks on it.

In order to strengthen our position also as a media platform, we brought in free to paid contents that were once sold on 3rd party services like Youtube, and Vlive from Naver onto our platform. This was very important for BTS’s music agency, Hybe Entertainment, because of expensive commission fees. By bringing in all the paid contents, it brought increase in revenue for the company.

After the initial release, in response to the COVID-19 era, we strengthened our relationship between fans and artists through online by hosting first-ever online BTS concert, ‘Bang Bang Con: The Live,’ on Weverse bringing more than 756,000 viewers joining from across the world.