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Lyrics Translation
in YouTube Music
Project Brief
A simple project adding lyric translation feature to YouTube Music.
Early attempt at UX design.
Highlights
Simple Improvement
My Role
I did everything
Project Timeline
One week, as part of an interview process.
Users
Music listener
Global background, global language needs (Interviewed)
Painpoints - Solutions
Lack of emotional connection due to missing lyric meanings
Music listener
Difficulty understanding cultural or social context of lyrics
Missed opportunity for language learning and deeper engagement
Lyrics translation feature on YouTube Music
Design Discussion
Focusing on small improvements or entire overhaul?
I’m doing the former here.
YouTube Music has become a popular case study for designers looking to build their portfolios. It's a smaller product within Google’s massive app ecosystem, which leaves plenty of room for improvement, even in its UI. However, the larger issue goes beyond just design in my opinion.
The real challenge is the blurred distinction between YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. With Premium, users can save videos to playlists, play them offline, and in the background, essentially turning YouTube into a music streaming app. This raises a key question: why use YouTube Music when Premium offers similar functionality? Without addressing this core overlap, any design tweaks to YouTube Music - including this project - while nice, may not solve the more fundamental problem of product redundancy.
Design Overview
Final Thoughts
Translation is a challenging task, especially when it comes to abstract concepts like poetry or song lyrics which often contain culturally specific metaphors that machine, even human translators can struggle to convey accurately.
However, YouTube offers a unique advantage. With the rise of media globalization, many artists now provide official multi-language lyric captions when uploading their music videos, which, conveniently, are also timed already. Additionally, numerous individual YouTube users create timed lyric videos themselves too, which could be easily adapted. Leveraging this content could serve as a strong MVP to attract international users.
If official translations aren't available, integrating Google Translate as a backup option could still be valuable. While machine translations aren't perfect, they are often better than no translation at all - with a disclaimer regarding translation quality, of course.
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