ROLE
Team Lead, Front End Developer
TIMELINE
January 2021 - March 2021
RESOURCES
Figma, HTML, CSS, jQuery, Node.js
TEAM
Lara Canonizado, Samuel Fleet
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Students suffer from discouragement which prevents them from progressing when learning a new instrument. Therefore, these people need a way to enhance their motivation and eagerness to play instruments.
WHY DO WE NEED A SOLUTION?
Having a hobby yet having no time for it is a common occurrence amongst people. Young adults especially may have a hard time balancing multiple parts of their life and may think they have no time in their day to pursue activities that they enjoy doing. For example, imagine having to juggle school work, extracurricular activities, a job, and maintain relationships with friends and family. All these aspects of a young adult's life may overwhelm and fatigue them, resulting in no determination to partake in something that they do simply for their own enjoyment, with no repercussions whatsoever. This is where PianoBud steps into play and encourages these young adults who specifically are interested in learning the piano to learn in short intervals that fit into their busy lives.
THE INSPIRATION
FOREST
A concentration app that is used to help students study by having a tree grown larger and larger as time goes by while their phone is not being used for whatever reason.
PianoBud pulls from this idea by having a plant on the Home Screen that progressively grows as the user finishes modules.
QUIZLET
A common app used amongst students to study with game like features such as matching words and definitions together.
PianoBud uses gamification in it’s design and functionality as well.
STORYBOARDING
When creating the initial idea of PianoBud, my teammates and I developed our own storyboards, demonstrating what we wanted our app to achieve. After reviewing everyones work, we had a consensus that PianoBud would focus on
high school and college students, as well as working adults.
AVERY’S STORYBOARD
Focuses on having PianoBud as the sole resource of learning the piano.
LARA’S STORYBOARD
Focuses on using PianoBud as a supplemental learning resource to go along with the traditional way of learning an instrument.
SAM’S STORYBOARD
Focuses on PianoBud becoming a way to learn in smaller, tangible modules to prevent burnout and feeling like there is no time to learn something new at all.
LOFI PAPER PROTOTYPES
Once our problem space was solidified, we now weaved onto the path of protoyping. My team and I knew we wanted to focus on two important things for learning retention and motivation: gamification and rewarding.
Unfortunately we were unable to test the validity of this claim with users due to time constraints, so we had to consider our own experiences as students and what helped us succeed in studying.
PROTOTYPE 1
Focuses on the gamification aspect of the app.
PROTOTYPE 2
Focuses on the reward and goal tracking aspect.
HEURISTIC EVALUATIONS
Our paper prototypes were purposefully created to use during our heuristic evaluations. If we had done a digital, high fidelity prototype instead, our evaluators may have felt intimidated obligated to only give positive feedback.
With the guidance of the 10 Usability Heuristics, we asked 3 evaluators to identify any issues we should address when moving onto the development of our application.
The following are the critiques mentioned:
Lack of showing status of completion for lessons
Poor navigation - users could not tell what page they were on
Lack of feedback for right or wrong answers on games and quizzes
No indicator of how long games were going to be played for
Some people preferred to see a back button to get more validation as to what page they were on
With this information, my group and I had come to realize that we lacked a lot of visual cues that are important for our potential users to see so they would not be confused and mislead into thinking PianoBud is a complicated app.
DIGITAL PROTOTYPE
We then moved onto Figma to layout the particular details that we either left out for the sake of repetitive drawing, or that our evaluators mentioned which we haven’t thought about previously.
TWO WEEKS LATER…
FINAL DECISIONS
DAILY GOALS to make learning more feasible.
Rather than having the immediate option to view all the modules, a daily goal function was implemented to give users a better sense of direction and pace when it comes to learning.
SHORT VIDEO LECTURES for people on a time crunch.
Part of the reason people may feel discouraged when it comes to learning something new would be the extensive amount of material that needs to be covered. PianoBud presents all material in small modules so busy people will still find learning the piano appealing without it interfering with their daily obligations.
QUIZZES to reiterate what people have just learned.
So you’ve watched the video lecture, but were you actually listening? The quiz feature was added to keep users accountable for the information that they took in. The videos are short, and we just want users to verify that they are not missing nay key points!
ACHIEVEMENTS PAGE as a form of encouragement and shown progress.
In order to prolong the constant use of the application, PianoBud includes an achievements page and leaderboard so users can look back at their work and gain motivation to fulfill new goals.
GAMIFICATION to encourage learning in a more stimulating way.
Gamification is a great way to learn and retain information since it can apply repetition as well. By presenting information in this way, we can also prompt motivation through competitiveness .
RETROSPECTIVE
PianoBud is the first project that I’ve done involving the design processes, and there were a number of restrictions when it came to creating this application. The most notable constraint would be the lack of time because this was a course project, as well as the lack of knowledge because I did not have much experience with HTML, CSS, Node JS prior.
If I was not required to use some front and back end development skills for this idea, I would have/want to…
Focused on thorough user testings to validate our design functionality
Design other features to enhance the application
Implement a virtual piano to play and use on the app
Implement a way to combine the application with physical playing
Regardless, my teammates and I were successful in developing a functional application that fulfills the solution needed to our problem of maintaining the motivation needed for users to progress in their piano playing skills.
Click here to view the app!