Guitar Singer
Date: 11.2.2015 - 11.13.2015
Teammate: Ellie Xu
Date: 11.2.2015 - 11.13.2015
Teammate: Ellie Xu
Ellie and I started with the intention to make an app that helps guitarists learn to play songs. Our first step was to do research on actual guitarists learning new songs. This helped us narrow down our focus and find out what guitarists currently struggle with.
Goal: Generate a list of findings and potential problem space.
• Interviewed 2 people about their guitar learning experience.
• Did contextual inquiry to observe how they learn a new song.
• We researched on the existing apps that relates to learning guitar.
• Goal: Find out what's the existing market like and what opportunity space we can target on.
Guitarists who have trouble learning the vocals of a song.
• Name: Andrew Simons
• Age: 18
• Job: High school student
• Description: Andrew has been playing guitar for 3 years. All of his friends are in choir, but he isn’t. He wants to use his guitar skills to entertain girls, but he isn’t comfortable with his own singing skills. He wants to start learning to sing while he plays guitar.
• Value system: Social > Time > Self Improvement
• Goals: Look cool. Get singing improvement quickly.
• Needs: A better way to remember words and melody
• Name: Christina Grey
• Age: 25
• Job: Painting teacher
• Description: Christina always wanted to learn guitar, now she finally bought one and starts to learn. When she hears a good song on the radio, she wants to learn it. She enjoys singing and playing guitar together and wants to perform at small events. As an artist she has high standards for things she presents.
• Value system: Expressing feelings > Quality > Social
• Goals: Match her feelings to the music. Share her music with others.
• Needs: Alternative styles and diffculty levels for rhythm and chords.
Provide a platform for guitarist to learn to sing while playing guitar.
• Researched on the existing apps that teaches people guitar and singing.
• Goal: Find out what they are doing good and what can we imrpove.
Based on the findings from previous interview and competitor analysis, we came up the concept.
• We tested our prototype on 4 customers in a Guitar Store.
• Why: A lot of people there fits our target group. People can use the guitar in the store to test on our prototype too.
• Finding: People don't know what the app is capable of, they are not sure what they can do here.
• Iteration: Delete the "More" button, and put the content outside instead of hiding them.
• Finding: People tend to think the chords and rhythm as a whole. And they want the chords and rhythm to change based on the different difficulty level.
• Iteration: Put chords and rhythm together as one action.
• Finding: People don't know they can loop a certain part of the song, there is no indication.
• Iteration: Offer indication for the loop function and make it more obvious
• Finding: People get confused about the rhythm. When there is a up arrow, they are not sure if they should drum up or down.
• Iteration: Changed the rhythm display, match it with physical movement (same as how others platforms do) but not the display of the guitar.
• Why: I chose the final version is because the rhythm is no longer connected to the guitar strings, it avoids the confusion. Also it aligns with both the physical movement and how are the exising guitar rhythms shown in other platforms.
Even though it is glitchy, only plays once, and doesn't have all of the features, the prototype accomplishes the goal of exploring how the animations would work.
• People with different guitar skill levels want different difficulty levels to learn.
• Different people have different tastes. Being able to choose your favorite background image makes it more pleasing when you need to look at the screen for long.
• Right now we are only focusing on guitar because guitar is the most popular tool. In the future we want to support other instruments too.
• Who will be offering the information of of the different songs in the app? If the users can create the information for songs and upload it, then how will the interaction be?
• Do we encourage social interactions in the app? People will be able to record their songs and share it with others, people can follow and like each other. Then it's turning a social networking platform based on singing with guitar.
• These decisions will be made by the user needs and which direction we want the app to grow.
I was involved with research, ideation, sketching, testing, iteration, high fidelity, and creating the javascript prototype.
Doing the analysis really helps to find out which areas are well covered and which areas need attention. It helps with the product positioning and it's clear why and how the product stands out.
I practiced more on the interaction and motion design part of mobile design.
We are currently using html, css, javascript to get the functional prototype into a testable state.