TIMELINE
July - September 2025
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
1 Product Designer, 1 PM
TOOLS
Figma
CONTEXT
Connecting K-Pop Fans Through Commerce and Community
hello82 is a global K-pop platform that connects fans with their favorite artists through exclusive merchandise and in person POP-UP events. As a product design intern, I led user research and designed a loyalty program that increased engagement, streamlined shopping, and improved event discovery. This work reduced navigation errors by 40% and increased user engagement by 10%.
THE PROBLEM
When discovery breaks down, loyalty disappears
Fans struggled to find what they wanted due to the lack of search, filter, and progress-tracking features, causing many to drop off before completing a purchase and reducing overall engagement.
INSIGHTS
85.7% of fans disappeared before checkout
K-pop fans are highly passionate, but that excitement does not always translate into completed purchases or continued engagement. When I spoke with customers at hello82 POP-UP events, many described getting lost in the app, repeatedly backtracking, and struggling to find merchandise or upcoming events. Instead of making fandom feel exciting and rewarding, the experience created friction and gave fans little reason to return.
SOLUTION
These insights led us to improve navigation and introduce a loyalty program.
A new merch experience allows fans to easily search and filter by artist, album, or category
Improving the Search and Filter
Find Events
A redesigned event flow lets fans easily find nearby experiences with filters
Loyalty Program
A rewards system that highlights points, redemption options, and tier progression to keep fans engaged.
ITERATIONS
Event Discovery Iterations
Validation and iteration came from multiple rounds of user feedback
Visually pleasing, but not scalable and will eventually be more cluttered when more stores open/venues.
Scalable and efficient, enabling quick sorting, filtering, and comparison of events without visual clutter.
Combining the map and list added visual weight and redundancy, making the interface feel busy.
Map View
List View
Map and List View
Merchandise Experience Iterations
Early tests showed that fans struggled to find products they wanted due to long scrolling, leading us to simplify search and browsing.
Long list of artists created difficulty to find artist
No filters caused long scrolling to find a product
Loyalty Program Iterations
User testing revealed that fans cared more about seeing how many points they needed to redeem rewards than how close they were to the next tier, leading me to shift the focus from tier progression to reward accessibility.
Users wanted to see their total progress for every reward, next just the one they're closest to
Progress bar showed how far the customer was to the next tier didn't give enough incentive to continue shopping
Final Solution
After many iterations, I created high-fidelity user flows of the shopping experience.
THE OUTCOME
Key Takeaways
Building out a design system — It’s so important to create reusable components so our designs remain consistent and scalable.
Good design starts with good research — Since I was redesigning the mobile app from the ground up, I spoke with users to understand their specific pain points and prioritize the most important design opportunities.