February 2020
UX Researcher
THE PROJECT
My client, a very skilled music teacher, wanted to check the feasibility of building an app to teach her music students how to read musical notes in order to improve their musical instrument playing.
I was very excited about the idea as I have been trying to play piano for so many years now and I know how difficult ( and important) is to learn sight reading.
THE RESEARCH
I have performed an extensive search of all the sight reading notes learning apps in the market and selected three of the most downloaded ones.
Below few screenshots of the competitor's research where different app's flows were analysed: launching the app, main sight reading practice the app, settings and a brief analysis of the design side.
My client also wanted a research about the user types for this kind of applications. She only performs the lessons in person therefore she was curious to know who is the student who decides to study music online.
I have conducted three user interviews amongst the users of these apps. I selected three different levels: beginner, enthusiast and professional users and created three profiles with their activities, feelings and thoughts extracted from their interviews.
THE CONCEPT
With all the information gathered from the interviews plus my clients knowledge about which features will be interesting to perform with the app, I have drafted our main persona together with his behaviours, needs and goals. Also I have drafted the most important user stories, problem statement and the hypothesis statement.
BUILD
In order to give my client a more visual overview, I have created few sketches with two main features:
1. Practice note reading from a real song
2. Review mistaken notes and play them
I started sketching screens in a very roughly visual ideas using crazy eights technique.
Afterwards I built the low resolution wireframes and I assembled a very rough prototype using Adobe XD.
TESTING
We run a small usability test to get insights of the features tested. This gave us good insight about issues we needed to correct. I graded each issue with Jakob Nielsen's severity rating scale and wrote recommendations for every usability issue.
THE RESULTS
Project is postponed until 2021 however this research helped the client to have a better insight of the note sight reading app's market but even more important: she got to know more about her target audience. She learnt valuable insight from music students that she was not able to reach before and therefore she changed her strategy and channels in order to expand more her network.
