Riffy

An app that encourages learning while playing for self-taught guitarists.

Project type

Individual project

Tools

Figma, Photoshop

Deliverables

Mobile app mockups

Duration

1 month

Learning and maintaining proficiency with an instrument without a teacher can be challenging. Over 90% of self-taught beginner guitarists quit within their first year while intermediate guitarists often find themselves stuck at their level because most people don’t enjoy learning boring technical skills.

PROBLEM

SOLUTION

Riffy is a guitar app that encourages users to learn technical skills while playing their favorite songs. By suggesting key skills and lessons for songs and fostering connections with other users for feedback, we can achieve the goal of maintaining their interest.

View Interactive Prototype Here:

DESIGN PROCESS 

Understand

Competitive Analysis

Interview

Define

Personas

Ideate

User Flow

Design

Wireframes

High-fidelity prototypes

Test

Next Steps

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

As a guitar player myself, I frequently use guitar apps. However, most apps currently on the market either concentrate on interactive learning or solely provide tabs for songs. There's a noticeable gap in options for guitarists looking to both play songs and improve simultaneously. To address this, I chose to analyze some of the most beloved apps among guitar learners, including Yousician, Ultimate Tabs, Justin Guitar, and songsterr.

From my analysis, I found a common issue among these apps: You can either be a learner or a player, but rarely both. But guitarists need to play songs to stay motivated, and they need to learn theory and skills to know the “why” of everything.

To better understand who our users are, I interviewed 5 guitarists with different lifestyles and skill levels. These are some notable findings.

  1. Self-taught guitarists often feel lost because they don’t know if they’re making mistakes.

  2. People who are learning the guitar while having a job or being a student spend less time practicing technical skills and learning about theory.

  3. Many people started playing the guitar because they wanted to be able to play their favorite songs.

  4. Beginners especially need motivation to keep learning, and that motivation often comes from being able to play full songs.

INTERVIEWS

PERSONAS

I then created these personas based on my interview findings, and decided that my target audience should be self-taught beginner to intermediate guitarists with other responsibilities.

PRODUCT STRUCTURE

Based on my research, I found that the features I could develop should be based on learning while playing and communication between users. Therefore, I decided to implement key skills and links to lessons into regular guitar tabs to help self-learners distinguish what skills they should be using while playing a song, as well as communication forums and chat feature to encourage the exchange of information between users.

WIREFRAMES

FINAL PROTOTYPE/MOCKUPS

Feature 1: Key skills in songs and tips & lessons pop up

1. Skill indicators and difficulty levels next to every song name to let the user pick which song they are going to learn based on what skills they want to develop.

2. After picking a song, the user can click on “tips & lessons” to get the skill names and links to their relative lessons to pop up at the exact points in the song that they are used.

3. Lesson page and suggested lessons to help the user keep on learning.

Feature 2: Forum, Posts, and Chat

1. Forums with different topics allow users to post their questions and tips, or share their progress.

2. Comment, like, and follow features allow users to exchange information and connect.

Onboarding

Main Screens

NEXT STEPS

After inviting 3 guitar players to test my prototype, I gathered some questions and concerns they have:

  1. Beginner guitarists who don’t know some of the technical terms like “vibrato” and “palm mute” can’t benefit from the skill indicators feature when they are trying to pick a song.

  2. People would like to see other people’s comments about specific songs and others playing the songs.

  3. Posting feature on one page is enough.

Therefore in future developments, I decide to:

  1. Add a definition feature that allows the users to click on the terms and see what they mean.

  2. Add a comments and reels section on the Tabs page encourages user connection about a specific song.

  3. Get rid of the posting button on the profile page.

Next

MCASD Mobile App