hidol
Shifted the product from an IP-driven model toward user co-creation, redefining its core experience while shaping it through the full lifecycle — from 0→1 and strategic transformation to sunset.
Highlight 01
Turning an AI Voice Letter into a Social Interaction Loop
From exploring opportunities to narrowing the direction, I translated research insights into design decisions through concept validation — extending a one-way voice letter into a social loop from receiving to replying.
Extending the Experience Beyond the Letter
AI Voice Letter uses voice-generation technology to let IPs connect with fans through voice messages that sound close to their real voices. While opening and receiving the letter created an immersive experience, the interaction ended once the message was over, leaving no natural next step to carry that experience forward. The team explored multiple possibilities through brainstorming, then narrowed them down based on feasibility and immersion. We ultimately chose a reply mechanism to connect receiving the letter with continued interaction.
The original letter-opening experience had been designed before I joined the project. After taking over, I preserved its core interaction logic and focused on extending what had been a one-time experience into a social reply experience between fans.
Once the direction was set, I worked with a researcher to validate the concept with three high-potential audience groups — UGC-oriented, deep-interaction, and documentation-oriented users — uncovering three key breaks in the experience.
Turning Research Friction into Design Decisions
Receiving and recording at the same time divided users’ attention.
I delayed the reply CTA until after the letter had been fully experienced, preventing recording from interrupting the moment while reducing the pressure to reveal oneself publicly before users were ready.
Turning a private letter into a public post felt disconnected.
I introduced a To / From letter card as the bridge into the public post, preserving the feeling of “writing back” rather than abruptly switching into a generic posting experience.
Making something public still feel private.
Although replies were ultimately public, participants preferred an experience that still felt private. I wrapped each reply in an envelope, revealing only part of the letter at first and requiring users to open it to read the full message. This preserved the intimacy of a personal letter while creating a psychological buffer before the content became fully visible.
Discovering Social Value Beyond Personalization
At the time, the personalization tagging system had not yet been built, meaning AI-generated messages were sent broadly and could not offer a truly personalized experience. This was a limitation the interaction design alone could not fully solve. But concept validation revealed something unexpected: users actively connected random messages to their own experiences and shared with one another what kind of reply they had received. When a message happened to resonate with their situation, it created a strong sense of being personally noticed by the IP. That insight shifted the opportunity. Even without true personalization, a response from the IP still carried significant social value. In the later design, I amplified the IP’s feedback on reply posts, turning the feeling of being “noticed” into a visible and shareable form of social recognition.
Highlight 02
Redefining the Product’s First Impression After the Shift
As hidol shifted from IP-to-C to C-to-C, I reworked its App Store communication strategy to translate the new product positioning into an acquisition story potential users could immediately understand — shifting the focus from “what the product offers” to “what you can do here.”
When the Story Fell Behind
App Store screenshots are more than a feature showcase — they are a key touchpoint where potential users form their first understanding of the product. Before the shift, the screenshots centered on IPs and related features, communicating a simple message: this is where you come to get closer to the idol you love. But as hidol shifted from IP-to-C toward C-to-C interactions between fans, that story no longer fully represented where the product was heading. The redesign wasn’t simply about replacing a set of visuals. It meant answering a more fundamental question: How should someone discovering hidol for the first time understand the product?
Putting Users First
The new screenshots no longer started with “What features does hidol offer?” Instead, they first helped users understand what kind of community this is and what they can do within it. I restructured the information flow to lead with the community positioning before moving into specific usage scenarios. Visually, IP-centered feature displays were replaced with real user scenarios, reducing the distance created by staged, brand-led presentation. The copy also shifted its subject from “what hidol offers” to “what you can do on hidol,” translating the new positioning into actions and value users could immediately understand.
Preserving What Still Worked
Moving toward C-to-C didn’t mean abandoning fans’ original desire to feel closer to their idols. I intentionally preserved “getting closer to your idol” as a core emotional proposition, while expanding what “closer” could mean — from reducing the distance between fans and IPs to also bringing fellow fans closer to one another. This connected directly to a key pain point identified in our earlier survey: users found it difficult to build deeper connections with other fans. Rather than replacing the product’s original value, the new C-to-C positioning extended it from a motivation fans already had.
Highlight 03
Shaping a Product Through Its Full Lifecycle
hidol took me through the full product lifecycle — from 0→1 and growth to strategic repositioning and sunset. It gave me a firsthand view of how market and user signals can reshape product direction, how design decisions play out after launch, and where growth can ultimately hit its limits.
Starting with IP
hidol initially attracted users through licensed IP content, successfully establishing its first group of core fans and clear usage scenarios. But retention remained highly dependent on IP, which also meant ongoing licensing costs and uncertainty around content supply and partnership conditions. This led the team to ask a broader question: Beyond “coming here for your idol,” could hidol give users a reason to stay on their own?
Content Without Community
Before the product shift, we saw a contradictory signal. UGC on hidol was growing rapidly, with post volume increasing by more than 1,000% in April, and the quality of the content was comparable to popular fandom posts on mainstream social platforms. But most of that content was still directed from fans toward IPs — expressions of support, messages, and shout-outs — rather than interactions between fans. The product was beginning to generate content, but it had not yet developed into a true community.
From Survey Findings to Product Direction
A survey of 1,200 users made the opportunity clearer. Fans’ biggest pain points were difficulty organizing their fandom journey (26%), information scattered across different platforms (24%), and lack of a community centered around their favorite idol where they could have deeper conversations (24%). At the same time, internal product data showed that one-on-one chat had the longest user dwell time, while fans continued to request group chat. Research, user behavior, and product data all pointed in the same direction: users did not simply need more IP content. They needed a space to connect with fellow fans, organize information, and build a record of their own fandom journey. hidol therefore gradually shifted from an IP-to-C model toward a C-to-C community centered on user-generated content and relationships between fans.
Value Created, Growth Unresolved
After the shift, design expanded beyond product features into external communication and acquisition, including reframing the App Store story to help potential users better understand the product’s new value.
hidol was sunset in June 2026. After the announcement, many users proactively backed up their Moments, posts, and fandom records. That gave me confidence that we had created something a portion of our users genuinely valued. But one problem remained unresolved: new users consistently accounted for less than 3% of the user base. We had given core users a reason to stay, but we had not yet found an effective enough way to help new users understand that value and enter into it.
Other Contributions
AI Style Transfer → Polling Feature
Started from an AI style-transfer concept and, after considering copyright and business feasibility, reframed it into a lightweight polling mechanic while preserving the core interaction: giving fans a way to participate in IP-related decisions.
Fan Group Chat
Responded to repeated fan requests by creating a new space for fans to connect with one another while also interacting with IPs in real time, extending the community experience beyond one-on-one interactions.
Lunar New Year Limited Theme
Designed a seasonal visual treatment to support Lunar New Year operations, using the festive context to refresh the experience and strengthen the sense of participation.
Results
- Registered users
- 40,467
- Peak monthly active users
- 16,817 (Jul 2025)
- Posts published
- 149,349 (6,093 users)
Active usage was driven almost entirely by existing users, with new users accounting for less than 3%. Retention was strong — after the sunset announcement, users proactively backed up their own content, showing that they genuinely valued hidol as a place to document and preserve their fandom journey. That value translated into strong engagement among existing users, but did not translate as effectively into new-user acquisition.
Retrospective
Rethinking What Success Means
From a business perspective, hidol did not find a model strong enough to stand out in the market. From a design perspective, however, we uncovered real user needs and created an experience that gave fans a reason to stay, document their fandom journey, and invest emotionally in the product. After the sunset announcement, users proactively backed up their content — one of the clearest signals that the value we created genuinely mattered to them.
Experiencing the product from 0→1 through transformation and sunset also reshaped how I think about the role of design. Design alone may not determine whether a product succeeds, but it can determine whether a product has genuinely created value for the people using it.
From Metrics to Meaningful Measurement
We defined metrics during planning, but some tracking data couldn’t answer the questions we wanted to validate. We later began working directly with data analysts to clarify how to measure those behaviors. Although the new approach wasn’t implemented before the product sunset, I learned that defining metrics is only the start; the data must support better decisions.