Theo.
A music theory app designed to take students from the basics to advanced jazz and classical concepts (and how we're incorporating it into our Student App).
Our music company, Atharo, was growing in all areas except academics. As the founder and original teacher, I realized the need to improve our educational content. While we hire the best teachers and trust them to design their own curriculum, it became clear that we needed to provide more guidance to enhance their teaching.
Since this app would be used by students of all ages, I needed to make the architecture as easy to navigate as possible while fitting in all the functionality it needed. My priorities were a clear table of contents with encouraging progress markers, informational chapters, videos, and games/quizzes.
Since games and quizzes are crucial to the app, I aimed to create a user-friendly pattern that encourages confident actions. Unlike other quiz apps that rush users to the next question, this solution lets students ponder their answers at their own pace. For audio-based questions, they can replay the sample before and after answering. The "next" button gives them control over when to proceed, which is essential in music learning, where repetition is key.
Integrating repertoire into the app was a challenge, especially for smaller devices. I wanted to find a way to make it very easy to use even on a phone.
While in full-screen mode, there were a handful of actions that I wanted to make available including saving the song to favorites, printing the song, logging practice directly from the song, setting a timer, etc. When the student clicks on the screen, an overlay with these options becomes available.
This theory app was to be both a stand-alone app and part of both the student and teacher apps through our software suite.
A major challenge with this product suite is designing for diverse user types, including teachers, parents, and students of different ages. To address this, we use onboarding to understand the user better. Students can indicate their age, which grants them access to one of two interfaces, and teachers can specify the type of practice expected from each student on their end, which connects with the student app.
Example of the design for younger students: This is the assignments/practice log section. It's linked to the teacher app, allowing teachers to monitor progress and adjust practice methods. For instance, teachers can set goals for students to practice an item a certain number of times per day:
...or they can set a total minute goal:
As we're still in the design stage for the theory app specifically, the challenge now is prioritizing features on the current student and teacher apps, and
creating a plan for the real "Theo" launch. Most likely this will be rolled out slowly as ebooks first, and adapted to the app as we perfect the curriculum.
Meanwhile, we are focusing on the development of the student & parent apps, and updating the teacher app with new features that will eventually connect to the student app.
