forScore Redesign

Project Summary: ForScore is a digital sheet music library where musicians can store, utilize, annotate, and share sheet music on an iPad, iPhone, or Mac. This project takes forScore's ability for effective practice a step further with the addition of a distraction-free mental health-focused “Practice Mode”.

Category: Mobile Design

Collaborators: Hailey Lemon

Dates: Jul 2022 - Aug 2022

My Role: UX Design, UI Design

Project Overview:

ForScore is a digital sheet music library where musicians can store, utilize, annotate, and share sheet music on an iPad, iPhone, or Mac. This project takes forScore's ability for effective practice a step further with the addition of a distraction-free mental health-focused Practice Mode.

Problem Statement:

💡

All musicians practice, but there are very few reliable and accessible resources that aid in and encourage healthy practice habits.

Design Process:

This project utilizes the Design Thinking Process:

❤️ Empathize ✅ Define 💡Ideate ✏️ Design 📊 Test

Empathize Phase

During the research phase, the following goals were established:

Overall Goal: Create an in-app practice tool that aids in healthy physical and mental practice.
Overall Research Goal: Establish a better understanding of practice habits in musicians.

More specifically, I wanted to:

Understand common issues faced during practice.
Know more about the structure/habits of practice (warm-ups, break times, etc.)
What goals musicians work towards during practice.
How musicians record/document practice and what these methods do for them. Additionally, what aspect of practice this method emphasizes.
What other tools are used to aid practice and how they feel about these tools.
How musicians feel about practice.
What musicians do to care for their minds and bodies during, before, and after practice.

Secondary Market Research

Musicians live busy and demanding lives. Brief market research revealed:

With all this in mind, I wondered why resources and tools for better mental health aren't more available to musicians.

Where I saw an opportunity was in practice applications. Practice is one thing that unites all musicians despite their instrument or style of music. Being a musician myself, I knew forScore was among the most popular tools utilized by musicians. Yet, an app used daily by many musicians does not include tools to help make practice a healthy and effective endeavor.

Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis was done to see how other popular tools were solving this issue. The competition also did not feature health-minded practice aids, indicating there was a real gap in accessibility and encouragement. Therefore, I turned my analysis to project-specific products, like digital practice journals, to see how they incorporated health into practice.

These apps included mood and focus trackers, open-ended journals, practice charts, goal establishments, and audio recordings.

Interviews

Virtual interviews were conducted with a pool of participants that identified themselves as forScore users that were also professional musicians, students, or hobbyists. I chatted with people all around the world, all with completely different skill sets and goals.

Key Takeaways

🎶

While everyone does practice to some extent, the definition of “healthy practice” is very individualized.

☝

All participants found that 1-2 hours of practice was an ideal time frame and preferred to be able to start practice sessions with a warm-up. However, warm-up time was often not prioritized even though users felt it better prepared them for a good practice session.

👀

Distraction-free practice was highly desired but something participants really struggled with during practice. Distractions were not counted as breaks for participants, and these periods of distraction would set them back in their practice time or sometimes end the practice altogether.

⚡

While participants did prefer distraction-free practice, they were also frustrated with forcing intensely focused sessions with no breaks. These types of sessions were often used to make up sessions skipped or previous sessions that were distracted.

🧠

Participants all desired better mental health practices within their practice and often mentioned their mental health being affected by practice to some extent.

🤕

Physically, participants commonly struggled with tension and pain during practice often as a result of no real structure or breaks.

“I often only stop practicing when I reach a point of severe tension and discomfort and I rarely take breaks.”

Other Important Considerations

💕

Participants desired better coping mechanisms, with some participants mentioning they ignore their mental health state altogether.

😓

Participants wished they felt like they could give up practice when they didn’t feel up to it.

🎹

Participants felt that when they feel good about themselves and their skills they tend to have overall better practice habits.

"My practice feels unhealthy because I don't take breaks. I feel sore and therefore can not practice to my standards. Because of this, I then feel bad about myself and the cycle continues.

🧘‍♀️

All participants mentioned stretching and breathing as their preferred way to relax physically and mentally during practice.

Define Phase:

Using my research, I developed a persona that represented my interview participants.

In addition to the persona, I developed an empathy map. While similar to my persona, I felt this step was necessary to help me better immerse myself in the minds of my users.

Ideation Phase

Based on my research and intentions of the integration, I decided the following features of the design were necessary:

Easy-to-access icon, research showed users prioritize tools with quick and simple access
Customizable set-up process since no two users had the same practice habits
Pre-practice check-in to encourage users to take time for themselves, mentally and physically
Visual timers to help minimize distractions as time management was a significant pain point for participants
Encouraging feedback since many users reported practice can be a self-deprecating process
Post-practice cool-down for reflection time
Practice summary for a quick overview of the session

Sketches

Design Phase

Wireframes

During the wireframing, I focused more on specific content than in previous stages, such as what type of questions should be included in the check-in screens and which of these questions should and shouldn’t be open-ended. I didn’t want this process to seem like an annoying task to users, so I had to keep these check-ins both meaningful and brief.

I knew that for some musicians, entering settings prior to each session was not realistic. Therefore, at this stage, I decided to implement the choice of using presets, including saved settings from previous sessions.

Additionally, I took some time to design notifications. This was inspired by how prevalent frustration with distraction was for users. While these screens weren’t carried over into my prototype due to no real way to implement them into the main task flow, I still find this to be an important part of the feature for some users.

The Final Product

After the wireframing phase, I quickly realized my simple addition would prove to be rather complex to prototype due to all the customizations. So, I got right to work!

Below is the finalized product after moderated and unmoderated user tests and iterations. Changes included labeling the Practice Mode icon as users that were new to forScore struggled with finding the integration. Most users who were familiar with the application and who were musicians said they were happy with the document-able content and felt it summed up most of what was important to them. Enjoy!

Reflection

❤️‍🩹

Designing for well-being felt very fulfilling! This project really taught me a lot about designing for the sake of the user. My participants all communicated feeling very heard with this implementation and wished it was a tool they actually had access to.

⚙

Customization does not always equate to good. During this project, I struggled with trying to implement too many customization options in hopes to cater to ALL users. I quickly realized that even though I had good intentions, too many settings and customizations were both hard to design and hard for the user to understand.

👥

It is impossible to design for everyone. Similarly to the point above, this project taught me there is no way to design for absolutely every person. Coming to terms with this was difficult at first, but I realized this is a very good thing about design. Users are more likely to use a design that fits their specific needs rather than a design that attempts to accommodate a wide range of potential needs.