DanceLib Case Study

The ultimate resource for couple dancers

Innovation designed to inspire creativity and streamline dance projects.

Client

DanceLib S/A

Date

August 2022 – July 2024

My Role

Brand and Product UX/UI Designer

Introduction

The largest couple dance video library is an innovative platform created by professional dancers to streamline the way they find inspiration and develop new projects, offering a much easier workflow and significant time savings.

Contributions to this project included brand identity, web, and product UI/UX design, as well as the creation of social media graphic guidelines, while collaborating closely with the marketing team to support the platform’s launch and ongoing visibility.

Key Milestones

  • Branding – October 2022
  • Traction Web Page – January 2023
  • Social media launch – February 2024
  • Product web home page – June 2023
  • Closed beta launch at WOTP event – July 7, 2023
  • Open beta launch – November 29, 2023
  • Iterations and improvements – October 2023 – May 2024
  • MyLib Beta launch (Personal Library)

Problem statement

Partner dancers often waste hours searching for specific moves on YouTube or personal archives from dance festivals, making it difficult and time-consuming to find consistent inspiration. They also struggle to organize files scattered across devices and lack a dedicated tool for creating choreographies for classes or performances.

Problem solution

DanceLib set out to create an efficient, centralized platform to simplify the process. As a library of classified, named, and tagged couple dance videos, DanceLib allows users to easily and quickly find inspiration among thousands of short videos showcasing dance moves. Users can personalize their experience by creating their own folders and playlists.

Problem statement

Partner dancers often waste hours searching for specific moves on YouTube or personal archives from dance festivals, making it difficult and time-consuming to find consistent inspiration. They also struggle to organize files scattered across devices and lack a dedicated tool for creating choreographies for classes or performances.

Problem solution

DanceLib set out to create an efficient, centralized platform to simplify the process. As a library of classified, named, and tagged couple dance videos, DanceLib allows users to easily and quickly find inspiration among thousands of short videos showcasing dance moves. Users can personalize their experience by creating their own folders and playlists.

The Full Project Journey

Go To Market Strategy

The GTM strategy was carefully crafted around three key building blocks: branding, positioning, and product strategy. Each of these elements played a vital role in shaping DanceLib’s identity, defining its market presence, and creating a clear roadmap for the MVP.

Branding: Setting the Foundation

Executed a Brand Sprint

Facilitated by the GTM strategist, with active participation from stakeholders, professional dancers contributing to the project, and myself, to create the foundation for brand ideation and the GTM Positioning Document.

The workshop uncovered DanceLib’s core values, brand personality, and positioning within the competitive landscape, identifying opportunities to stand out while addressing the target audience’s needs and aspirations.

The Big Hug concept creation

The Big Hug concept unites the dance community, symbolized by a circle surrounding the DanceLib logo. This circle conveys community, friendship, and unity, while its segmented design represents a well-organized library and the harmony of individual steps coming together.

Vibrant colors, ranging from warm tones to intense purples, evoke the passion and dynamism of partner dancing. The dashed line element, adaptable in various forms, ensures instant brand recognition. Firm yet soft typography balances stability and calm, complementing the brand’s colorful, dynamic identity.
The logo embodies DanceLib’s core values: Inspiration through creativity, Legacy as an emblem, and Sharing through the inclusivity of the Big Hug concept.

Branding the Studio

To meet the demands of DanceLib’s video production, a dedicated studio was built and equipped with professional – grade technical equipment. Instead of a logo on the walls, we opted for subtle, clean graphics – white for the front and gray for the back camera view. This approach ensured every video carried a distinctive and recognizable connection to DanceLib’s visual identity.

Delivered a comprehensive Brand Guidelines

The Brand Identity section focused on defining DanceLib’s positioning, including its story, values, personality, tone of voice, and messaging, ensuring consistency in both internal and external communications. The Corporate Identity section provided an extensive visual identity framework, detailing the logo system with usage guidelines, typography, color palette, and graphical elements. Additionally, it included practical design examples. This thorough documentation ensures a cohesive and professional brand presence.

Driving Traction and Growth

After defining the tone of voice and messaging, we designed a traction web page to collect email addresses of interested dancers. Simultaneously, we developed the visual identity for social media and email marketing to ensure a consistent and engaging brand presence.

In parallel, we began designing the product’s main home page with a focus on attracting and converting a broad audience. Additionally, extensive graphic design work was done for events such as dance festivals, ensuring brand visibility across all touchpoints.

Traction web page

We conducted a 5-second test to assess whether potential users could understand the page’s purpose from its imagery and messaging. The results showed that users didn’t clearly recognize it was a web app or its intended function. Based on this feedback, we completely revised the messaging and visuals.

Product's web home page

The DanceLib home page evolved through several iterations as the app’s visuals, functionality, and content developed. In the early stages, with no app or dance videos available, the focus was on introducing the concept and engaging users.

Months of video shooting followed, capturing high-quality dance content, which became essential for both the platform and promotional efforts. The latest design showcases the platform’s value, benefits, and rich video content to captivate its audience.

Social media visual identity

For DanceLib’s social media, primarily Instagram, I created comprehensive guidelines for the team to ensure consistency in the visual identity. These guidelines outlined the use of colors, images, graphics, and fonts, helping to maintain a cohesive and recognizable brand presence across all posts and campaigns.

Email marketing graphics

DanceLib at the Dance Festivals

Product Design: From Vision to Reality

Embarking on the DanceLib project, we faced the challenge of designing an innovative platform with no role model to follow. This required defining key features from the ground up while addressing the real needs of the target audience.

Through continuous iterations based on feedback from professional dancers, we developed a seamless user experience. The result was a platform that achieved its initial goals and set a new standard in the dance community.

Discovery

Process involved conducting competitive research and defining real user needs, leveraging insights from our 20 investors – professional dancers, who were not only funding the project but were also its core users. Their feedback was crucial in highlighting the need for a library and tool to streamline and optimize their workflows, helping us identify the essential features to include in the MVP.

Although DanceLib is an innovative app with no direct competitors, dancers often rely on existing platforms for similar needs. These include YouTube for dance video searches, TikTok and Instagram for inspiration, online classes for learning, and various cloud solutions for storing and organizing videos.

To ensure the best user experience, I conducted extensive UX research, analyzing apps with similar features. This identified effective approaches to adopt and areas needing custom solutions tailored to the project’s unique needs.

Ideation

During DanceLib’s ideation phase, we worked as a team to transform concepts into actionable designs. Starting with the definition of functional specifications and the MVP for the initial release, we moved on to crafting user stories and user flows to map dancers’ journeys. I then began developing desktop and mobile wireframes to establish primary navigation and core UX principles, creating a solid foundation for an intuitive and functional app interface.

UX/UI Design

The wireframes laid the foundation by finalizing the structure, navigation, and MVP functionalities with basic UX solutions in place.

From there, the UI design phase began, refining the user experience through visual elements and iterative improvements based on feedback from professional dancers.

Key Functionalities Solutions

Complex Search System

The DanceLib platform launched as a comprehensive couple dance video library featuring over 6,000 videos across 11 dances. One of the biggest challenges was designing an advanced search and filtering system to handle the intricate tagging of dance movements and figures.

Through multiple iterations, we developed a system that was intuitive for users and supported seamless navigation through hundreds of movements for each dance.

By entering a keyword into the search bar, users receive a dropdown of relevant tags – including highly detailed movement descriptions. They can select a tag or press enter to view all results matching the input.

For even more precise results, users can apply multiple filter categories and utilize an advanced fine-tuning filter menu.

Innovative Video Viewing and Management Options

DanceLib’s standout feature is its unique four-angle video system, showcasing movements from the front, back, and both sides. This functionality sets the platform apart and is highly praised by dancers for its practical value in learning.

We prioritized innovative video management and viewing options, introducing capabilities rarely found in other video applications. Users can browse the library while staying in full-screen mode, add videos to playlists, and access detailed video info – all without leaving the viewing screen.

Additional features include:

  • Speed control to slow down or speed up videos.
  • Looping specific video sections to focus on mastering precise movements.

Video Playlists

The playlist feature offers dancers a tailored space to prepare choreography for classes, competitions, or practice sessions. Users can compile and organize variations of movements to refine technique or experiment with new ideas.

Designed for simplicity, the playlist interface enables easy video management:

  • Add or remove videos with ease.
  • Rearrange video order through drag-and-drop functionality.
  • Access video-specific controls via a numbered overview for transparency and flexibility.

Simple Organization System

Both DanceLib and MyLib feature a straightforward folder structure for effortless organization. Users can create folders and subfolders to categorize playlists, ensuring their content is easily accessible and neatly organized at all times. On the desktop version, files are easily managed through the left menu, with the added convenience of drag-and-drop functionality on the right side, allowing users to organize playlists and folders intuitively.

DanceLib Mobile UI Design

MyLib

MyLib takes personalization to the next level, allowing users to upload or record their own videos directly within the app. Detailed tagging ensures seamless integration with the library’s search system allowing users to categorize their videos seamlessly. With folders and playlists, users can efficiently manage their content and share playlists with partners or students to enhance collaboration.

MyLib Mobile UI Design

Key Takeaways

Reflecting on this project, I gained valuable insights into balancing stakeholder expectations and design principles:

  • Prioritizing Quality Over Speed: Tight deadlines led to compromises on functionality and UX/UI, with plans to improve later. However, revisiting unfinished features proved challenging. The takeaway: investing time upfront in key elements ensures a stronger product and better customer retention.
  • Ensuring Consistency: While the branding and design systems provided a strong foundation, inconsistencies arose in later materials due to a lack of understanding or alignment with the guidelines. The takeaway: better onboarding and clear communication with all contributors are essential to maintaining a cohesive brand.
  • Effective Feedback-Driven Design: Intensive user testing and feedback conducted through the Canny tool during the open beta, led to meaningful UX/UI enhancements. The takeaway: Establishing effective systems to gather and analyze user input is essential. Equally important is close collaboration between the UX designer and project manager to prioritize the most impactful improvements.

What I Would Do Differently

  • Advocate more strongly for maintaining the MVP scope using the “cupcake approach” to balance quality with speed.
  • Collaborate more closely with developers to bridge design-to-code gaps.
  • Emphasize the importance of adhering to brand guidelines for long-term product consistency.

Final Note

I am proud of my contributions to DanceLib, though the current live product reflects changes in branding and UI/UX design since my departure – primarily on the product web page and Instagram graphics. While the product design remains mostly as intended, some UX/UI elements were either not implemented or differ from my original designs. To showcase my work, I have included Figma files and the original brand assets in this presentation.

What DanceLib Users Says

DanceLib is brilliant! The collaboration with dancers, amazing content, and useful features like tagging and playlist creation add so much value to the platform. The controls for looping and camera switch really enhance the overall experience. It’s a must-have for dancers.

Ramona B., Germany
Dance instructor

In just a few clicks, you can have precious inspiration in your hands created by some of the best dancers in the world! DanceLib fits exactly what we need in the dance community.

Carlos Oliviera, Brazil
Brazilian Zouk teacher

I find DanceLib both inspiring and incredibly helpful. The innovative angle views add a powerful dimension to learning. The extensive video library and effective filtering options pleasantly surprised me – a valuable resource for any dance professional!

Laury B., France
Dance professional

I love the idea of having an organized and updated dance library. DanceLib is one of the best things I’ve come across in the world of dance in a while!

Samantha Dias, Florida, USA
Dance professional

Dancelib offers an innovative solution for dance teachers and students alike, designed for a optimal user experience and to cater for all dance styles. The best part? It’s helping to make dance accessible globally without compromising on quality. Highly recommended !

Anna Stewart, France
Salsa teacher

DanceLib combined the right features in their app to make it functional and very useful for dancers. I love using their playlist creation feature to start organizing my ideas.

Christian Calayag, Philippines
Dancer

Transform Your Vision into Reality

Let's Collaborate on Your Next Project