Kloud Karaoke
A playlist console app &
a revitalised instant booking website
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT belting out your favourite tunes in a small dark space with friends and family. But when you are being charged per hour, time is of the essence.
Imagine going for a karaoke session where all your favourite songs could be instantly synced from your phone to the console — your time is maximised for singing.
The problem is that Kloud Karaoke has the technology for it, but this unique experience has not been capitalised on and promoted to prospective karaoke goers.
Photo: Jason Strother/The World
Every Kloud has a silver lining
Kloud Karaoke is a lounge located in East Singapore, that positioned themselves as a "Family Friendly Karaoke".
My team and I paid a visit to their website and certain things are clear:
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All of their content sat in a single page with no additional pages like About or Promotions.
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The website lacked information such as outlet location and pricing for sessions above 3 hours.
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Their online form for reservations did not display availability, and had no submit button.
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Their branding did not reflect "family-friendly" at all.
Kloud's website as of 29 July 2020
Interestingly, Google reviews left by Kloud's patrons revealed that there was a mobile site that connected to the KTV system via a unique code.
Since this site could only be accessed while connected to Kloud’s wifi (and a service safari was not possible due to its mandated closure), our endeavour to conduct a thorough content inventory was limited. Nonetheless, this meant that there were existing synchronisation capabilities that we could leverage on for our project!
What's Klouding the karaoke experience?
We wanted to explore the pain points people had when they attended karaoke services, starting from the moment they decide to plan for a session.
"I will always call in to book a session, because I need to know if it's available... the slots I want they don't always have. Previously I used an online form to book, but in the end it didn't even confirm, and I only found out when I was at the place."
— Quote from a user interview
We also discovered that people found the song selection consoles in the room frustrating to use due to the poor interface design.
"Finding the songs is a super inefficient process. I need to scroll page by page, and then after I click add, I need to figure out how to go back to the playlist again... it's terrible"
— Quote from a user interview
We identified key insights from the affinity map to construct a persona, Kara Oh (pun intended) and a service blueprint, in order to understand how we can help our target users. Kara is a 27-year-old single woman who enjoys singing karaoke with her close friends and colleagues.
Service staff are expected to handle booking calls manually, serve F&B orders, and troubleshoot when there are problems with the karaoke console. That's a lot!
A convenient way to prepare for karaoke
The opportunity presented here was to:
Enable instant online bookings
This will be advantageous for both the business and user. Users will have more control over their bookings, and staff workloads will be relieved for other duties. With more operations being digitised, the business can reduce recruitment costs.
Next, to target Kara's frustrations with the console, the app must:
Allow for playlist curation prior to the session
This solution will capture the common theme we heard among the interviews: people ultimately want efficiency in preparing for their karaoke sessions.
Before jumping into the designing process, we created two user flows to understand the end-to-end experience starting from: 1) before the session, and then 2) during the session.
BEFORE THE SESSION
DURING THE SESSION
We can't have our head up in the Klouds
Based on the tight timeline of 2.5 weeks, we had to focus our efforts. What were we trying to accomplish? Ultimately, we want to achieve a 20% lift in conversion rates for Kloud Karaoke. So we had to push out an MVP app for song selection, and revitalise the old website through the following:
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Improve navigation of the current website
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Design navigation of the app
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Refresh Kloud Karaoke's branding
Improve navigation of the current website
We took after the standard labels from competitor websites like Teo Heng, Cash Studio and HaveFun.
Design navigation of the app
The site map for our app was not as clear-cut, so we conducted a tree test to validate our proposed labels. We tested to see if users could correctly locate a song, manage their account, manage their playlists and make a booking, and the tasks returned with satisfactory success rates.
Refresh Kloud Karaoke's branding
Kloud positioned themselves as a "Family-friendly karaoke", but their various communications did not reflect it. We decided to strategically refresh their branding. We retained familiar elements of their logo to retain their current customer base but refreshed the palette to attract new customers. The new colour palette adds more vibrancy to the brand.
We considered different devices and their contexts, when and why they are used. The website was designed to have a bright exterior to welcome new users whereas the mobile app was designed to have a dark coloured background for more comfortable reading inside dimly-lit karaoke rooms.
"Optimising... means designing an experience that is uniquely tailored to that channel... it may mean to occasionally forego crosschannel consistency — at least to some extent."
— Kim Salazar/Nielsen Norman Group
A peek into the redesigned app and website
Mic test... 123 mic test...
After usability testing of the app, we had to make some copywriting and UI changes. Many people couldn't understand the pricing scheme because they were confused by the timings. We added a clear heading that prices indicated were for 3 hour bookings. Information on the 'next steps' and app summary were also condensed and simplified.
Moving forward
There is a lot more to be done with Kloud Karaoke's app. What if we could sync Spotify playlists? Can they view lyrics on the app? What about recommending songs based on their music tastes? These are areas worth exploring. But for now, feel free to check out the current prototype!