Finding your personalised New Year Song
Solo Project from Concept to Deployment
Duration
4 Days (2025)
My Role
Solo Project (Planning, Designing, Development)
Overview
What is New Year Song?
In Korea, there’s a fun belief that the first song you listen to on New Year’s Day sets the tone for the entire year. Inspired by this, I built this project to help you find your own "destiny song."
I planned, designed, built, and deployed the service independently. I used AI tools to support the development process and turn the concept into a working web service.
Problem Space
What is the issue?
"I want a song that matches my New Year's mood."
Every year, YouTube is full of general "New Year’s First Song" playlists. But for many users, these don't feel personal enough.
1. Search for my vibe: Users have to browse several playlists before finding a song that matches what they want for the new year.
2. Checking the lyrics: Users also need to check each song’s lyrics themselves to see whether its message fits their wish.
Research
Analyzing SNS trends
I reviewed popular music-curation posts on social media and found that high-engagement posts often explained a song’s lyrics and message, rather than only naming popular tracks. This suggested that users were looking for songs that reflected their own situation, not just songs that sounded good.
User Voice
User comments often connected specific lyrics with personal experiences and future goals.
Setting the Hypothesis
If the service matches a song to a user’s wish, users should be able to find a relevant track faster than by searching manually.
Database categorisation
I collected more than 200 songs from popular “New Year’s First Song” playlists and sorted them into six categories. This gave the recommendation flow a fixed set of songs to match against.
Matching a wish to a song
The system analyses the user’s wish, identifies its main theme, and selects a song from the corresponding category. TIt then generates a short explanation connecting the user’s wish with relevant lyrics from the recommended song.
Impact
Launched as a seasonal web service, this project recorded 298 total visits during its 2week launch period. The service received 298 visits during its first two weeks. Of those visitors, 54.7% completed the recommendation flow. “Career” was the most selected category. The submitted wishes were often specific, especially around career goals and personal plans. The service generated a song recommendation and explanation for each completed response.
Total visits
Task completion rate
Top user choice
Key Learnings
What I Learned as a Product Designer
Built and deployed the entire web service alone using AI without any development background, improving my AI skills.
Managing the project from concept to deployment helped me understand how planning, implementation, launch, and basic operations connect in a small product.
Felt a deep emotional connection by reading user wishes, growing my curiosity for products that truly connect with people instead of just making services I want to build, and inspiring me to do more of this in the future.