Weverse was launched in June of 2019 by Hybe corporation, a South Korean entertainment company. The app was created with the intention of allowing users to have more communication with their favorite K-pop artists. In the South Korean music industry, companies want the fans to feel as if they have a strong emotional relationship with an artist so, most of the industry’s branding and marketing is to enhance the parasocial relationship fans feel with the artists.  Although the app is less known to those outside of the K-pop community, the music genre has become very popular lately, so it is not surprising that the app currently has around 36 million users.

There are over 30 different artists on Weverse currently; each artist has its own community and users can be in multiple different artist communities. In each artist community there is a feed, artist, media, and a live section. It has features like most social media apps as artists can post stories, comments, pictures and go live to interact with fans. While users can post any content they want, user posts are generally messages of adoration for their favorite artists; however, users have the option to hide content from the artists if they don’t want them to see something. In addition to the content made by the artist there is a section for media, which include live performances, music videos, variety shows and more. Old videos of artists going live are also saved on the app, so users can watch them at any time. Official news by the artist and company is most often released on Weverse as well; for instance, fans are notified about tour or album announcements through Weverse. Other parts of the app include Weverse magazine and Weverse shop. Weverse magazine includes different articles about the artists while Weverse shop allows users to buy official merchandise from artists and groups.

For the user experience test, three participants conducted six different tasks, which are common tasks that users would do daily when engaging with the app. The first task was joining the app and setting themselves up into an artist community. The second task included: liking an artist post, commenting, deleting, bookmarking, and finding bookmarks. The third task was to translate an artist’s post and figure out how to translate to other languages. In the fourth task, participants browsed through videos while using subtitles. The fifth task was creating a user profile. In the last task, the participants created two posts, where in one of those posts, participants had to use the hide from artist feature. At the end of the test, participants conducted a survey from the system usability scale to rate how the experience using the app was overall.

Overall, the user test proved to be successful as all the participants were comfortable with the app as they completed the different tasks. On average, most of the tasks took the participants around two minutes to complete, as noted on the data table below. Challenges and difficulty the participants had seemed too due to more unfamiliarity with the app rather than the app being complex itself. No major problems or inability to navigate through the app occurred during the test. Through the usability test it can be inferred that one of the reasons Weverse has an abundance of users is because it proves to be accessible and easy to navigate through the main functions of the app. However, the application would not be as successful if there was not the emotional closeness that fans feel with the artist. The love, interest, and happiness the artist brings fans are the driving force behind the successfulness of Weverse.

In regard to improvements for the app, one would be better organization for better efficiency. Things like bookmarks, finding translation language, user profiles and others were all located at different locations. For better accessibility, having them all in the user icon page would be easier for users to navigate through. Another improvement would be to have subtitles for all videos and media. In addition, auto translations for when artist go live on Weverse. In regard to a redesign, including a direct message feature would enhance the connection between artist and fans. As of now, there is no way to directly communicate with an artist unless they comment on your post, so having an artist inbox where there could be more one-on-one communication would be a great addition to the app.