Piano Way is a mobile educational app that teaches to play the piano. With the help of short lessons, piano games, and a songbook you can start playing simple melodies right away. The application fits any level from a total newbie to some piano skills.
I was fortunate enough to join the team when Piano Way was only an idea. So I have possibility to went through all the stages of its research, design, development, and tests from the very beginning.
As the sole designer on the Piano team, I was responsible for...well, everything that related to how the application works, looks and feels.
I collaborated with PO and PMM on product and marketing strategy, brought and discussed ideas, designed them, tested and measured.
I collaborated with PO and PMM on product and marketing strategy, brought and discussed ideas, designed them, tested and measured.
Created a whole visual style of the app including UI screens, illustrations, animations, videos, and a design system.
Checked the screens from dev, content and materials from marketing designers, video operators, illustrators, and motion designers.
Many people think playing the piano is something you need to learn for years and is hard.
Well, I got it. Classic piano schools are full of unattractive things like solfège and scales and the moment when you can finally play anything cool seems distant.
Also, not everyone can afford a piano tutor and had already struggled with self education (video lessons on YouTube).
The main idea was to create an interactive app that can teach you piano in an easy and engaging way.
No more long, boring, detailed full lessons, and more actual play.
When we just started, our budget for research was stiff so I discovered all information I could get for free. Here I provide some low-cost things I did:
I become a FB and Reddit ninja, looking for posts where people share their frustrations related to piano study, especially to music apps. Then studied those people's profiles and gathered demographic data to create a use case.
I identified and analyzed all big players in the piano music area to understand their main features and strong sides.
Also, I used screenshots of competitors’ apps to create the first user flow. It seemed to me that this approach is faster and more demonstrative for stakeholders than the usual user flow schema.
As I said there was a stiff budget for interviews and I needed any info I could get. So we ran the hall interview at the office and get some insights for usability issues. We asked people to perform a small task and comment everything they see on the screens, meanwhile making notes and video recording. Then we made a list of UI/US issues like popup blindness or too small exit icon, and worked out them one by one.
This is how it was started. The first sketches showcases our idea about 3 main courses splited after the basic course. We decided to stop on 2 and increased the number of basic courses.
During the MVP stage we ran some users interview and got the main concerns of our target audience:
We composed our product goals based on this concerns:
Virtual interactive keyboard
To make an understanding what is piano without a real instrument we create a virtual interactive keyboard.
At the very beginning, this feature was made for Songbook, but then we focused on it as a potential killer feature and expanded it through the educational process.
Virtual interactive keyboard substitutes a real piano when user doesn't have a real one yet. It helps users to complete first courses, and even play easy melodies before getting an instrument. This feature gives the basics of piano play, but what is most important - also an understanding of what it is.
Users can make the next step and purchase the instrument or stay on the beginner courses or Songbook and just enjoy easy melodies as long as the user wants.
Theory into practise
For those users who can’t afford to practice piano for hours or are easily bored, we came up with the idea of short but consistent lessons. We split our courses into small pieces, weeded out all unnecessary things for beginners, and trim the timing as much as possible.
User paths in Amplitude showed us that users tend to skip theory videos and went straight to practice. Can’t blame them, totally understand that watching is not as amusing as trying. So the next solution I offered is to shorten the video lessons drastically by…cutting some of them out.
We added the theory to the practice mode, so users could start learning and playing right away.
It worked great - percent of users who finished the first lesson increased as well as the start of the next lesson. It influenced on user engagement metric and proved our idea about rapid educational flow.
AHA-moment
As the solution to people's concerns about the complexity of playing the piano we created the AHA-moment. We wanted to show users that piano is not a rocket science and that everybody can play.
It's a simple game-like practice at the start, where the user taps on the virtual piano keys in a specific order. On a first step, it is a scale (plays notes one by one just to hear them sound), then a simple melody. The user understands that the keys he pressed before become a melody.
We highlighted that if you can manage this practice then you can handle the piano play (I must say the game was really straightforward)
This feature succeeded (start first lesson metric went higher as well as retention) and after tests it become the part of the app.
They say there is no one common way to create a design system. I studied many examples and designed my own design system as well as a file organization system.
As Piano Way was my first product design project I got a lot of bumps working on it. I had to learn fast, didn't have anybody staying behind and guide me. But every time I learnt from my mistakes, never repeat them again, and made my skills better.
What I could recommend myself back then is being more persistent in terms of getting help or advice. Useful tips and feedbacks from other designers could save me loads of time.