2017 / RESEARCH + USER FLOW + MOBILE UI
ROLE
Lead Designer
OVERVIEW
Cifraclub’s website has been online since 1996 and is the largest online musical education service in Brazil. It has song’s tabs and chords for guitar, electric guitar, bass, piano, keyboard, drums and harmonica. In addition, it has video-classes and excellent music teachers.
With the website’s success they ended up creating the mobile application which can also be used to learn how to play musical instruments. Users can watch free videos of guitar, bass, drums, singing and music theory. It has about 500 thousand songs such as classical songs and the top 100 of all Brazilian musical styles, from Pop to Bossa Nova.
PROBLEM
Cifraclub is overall a good app, but it contains a lot of advertising in the middle of the UI which disrupts the good user experience. In addition, I’ve noticed that the application is very focused on users that listen to brazilian music only, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but combined with the little possibility of customization (there is no registration or login) it can lead to a low engagement of users who do not actually listen local music. Besides, due to the lack of registration users frequently loose their songs and lists when they need to reinstall the app. Finally, it’s filters and listing are not very smart, so I believe they could be optimized to improve filtering and search results.
NOTE: now Cifraclub’s App has a registration flow.
FOCUS IS KEY
I’ve decided to focus on creating a registration flow because I’m an Cifraclub’s user myself and I have been frustrated with the lack of login more than once. In addition, I’ve tried to improve the app’s experience to create more value and make users feel good while using the application. But well, let’s go by parts.
IMPROVING CONTENT AND INFORMATION
When I worked in the app’s home, my primary goal was to optimize the delivery of relevant content to the user. To increase user engagement I’ve decided to create new content sections beyond the current Top Chords by bringing the Top Artists and Top Hits’s tabs, where the user has the possibility to stay inside the music’s trends and learn to play them.
Focusing on the main purpose of the app which is to teach people to play songs, I thought it would be interesting to communicate the level of difficulty to play each song in the rank to the user. In addition, I wanted to give a highlight to the #1 of each list, in order to differentiate it from the others.
WHERE THE HELL ARE MY SONGS?
As I said earlier, when I’ve redesigned Cifraclub’s app it did not have a registration flow, which was enough to make users crazy! You just had to go to the app store to find dozens of comments from frustrated users who lost their songs when they’ve reinstalled the app.
Due to that, I ended up designing countless wireframes to reach an ideal register flow until I came up with an idea that would allow users to take a look at the application before doing any kind of registration and then, at a certain key point, the application would ask the user to sign up.
So my thinking process was: when users create a list with the chords of their favorite songs the application would take advantage of this particular moment and ask them to sign up, using the argument that only then they could see their list in any device. For dedicated students this would be a great chance to practice songs they like from anywhere and Cifraclub would obtain a solid user database that could help the app affording really cool features and personalized content in the future!
Don’t hesitate to send me a message, I’d love hearing from you and I’d never refuse a nice chat + coffee: juliaxavierfernandes@gmail.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-xavier-2847555b/
