Notey's World
UI/UX, Product, Brand, Marketing
Shunt Balushian, Adithya Bellathur, Jack Bailey, Atlus Lin, Mak Grgic
2023 - present, NYC
Notey's World
Context
90% of first time music learners stop learning their instrument within the first month, and many students don't continue learning music after their first introduction to music in a classroom setting. Notey's World set out to understand the early stages of music education, and seeks to see if a gamified approach that emphasized learning through play could help students establish a more positive relationship with music and if we could provide helpful tools to educators to introduce music in a delightful way.
Understanding the problem
To keep a focused approach, the first version of Notey's world focuses specifically on guitar and guitar education. While it can be played with any instrument (and is being successfully used in a private piano school) the focus was important to accurately understand player needs and keep scope in check.
We sought out to understand why learning the guitar was so difficult particularly in classroom settings during the middle school years when most young students would be introduced to it for the first time. I had a lot of initial conceptions coming into it as to why the learning the guitar was difficult - a lot of early music education is taught with classical songs that are unfamiliar, music theory is both important and complex/uninteresting to early learners, it takes time to build finger strength to properly play, and while we found all of these to be true to some degree, the real reasons students struggled to learn in their early years were more layered and complex.
The truth is that performing an artistic act for the first time, especially in front of your peers, requires vulnerability, and that kind of vulnerability at a young age doesn't come easy. To that end, we found that the students who exceed in classrooms and develop the most positive relationships were extroverts who were unafraid to ask for repeated lessons, while the introverts lagged behind because if a concept or exercise was difficult, they were less likely to seek help from another person and struggled to keep up as the curriculum continued on.
Additionally, it's difficult to impossible for a music teacher to keep up with each student's progress outside of 1:1 lessons. Especially in schools in the U.S. that can have 30 students per teacher, if one student starts to fall behind, the teacher can't modify the entire curriculum to match individual needs. This leads to disappointment and dissatisfaction from all angles, and eventually students give up on learning an instrument as a whole.
A Solution
This is where Notey's World comes in. One the individual level, students can learn at their own pace, matching their current ability, and experience a gamified form of music education through platformer level, boss fights, and more. On the educator side, teachers are able to upload their entire music curriculum and have it be seamlessly translated into levels in Notey's World and even entire school themed worlds.
Below is work I made for Notey's World. An in depth UI/UX case study and process walk through is available upon request. To keep up to date with what Notey's world is up to, check it out on the App Store or notey.co.
Additional Work
Planning and Analytics
Level planning and organization done in FigJam and quantitative analytics done in Mixpanel
Additional Screens and Features
Weekly and daily challenges, more tutorial screens, world select, sign in, and subscription. While most of the UI shown here is the iPad version (the version that is used most commonly in classrooms), all the UI is also responsive and works on iPhone horizontally as well.
marketing and brand
Website
I designed and built our website, notey.co, with Framer to serve as a marketing website and funnel interested uses to our App Store page. Currently it receives 1.5k views/month.
App Store
The App Store screenshots were designed by me along with a beautiful backing illustration made by Jack Bailey.
Promo Video
I made our promo video which was used as an ad and as a highlighted part of our website. It's a combination of licensed stock footage and some tricky rotoscoping in Davinci Resolve.
Fundraising and Awards
I did the visual work in creating our pitch deck with illustration from Jack Bailey and content and help from Adithya Bellathur and Mak Grgic. With this pitch deck we were invited into Techstars Winter 23' Cohort, won a VC Investment competition from the USC Marshall School of Business, received a "Technology in Education" award from InnoVision, and received a $50K research grant from the South Carolina Research Authority.
