Duple
A Tool for Effective Music Practice and Communication
Objective
Build a two-tiered end-to-end app
A study in how technical tools can aid music teachers and students in their daily practice and teaching.
My Role
Research
Personas
Prototyping
Storytelling
User Flow
User Testing
Design
Team
Individual Project, with feedback from Group Crit peers and mentor.
Tools
Figma
Duration
August-December 2024
Designing an app that serves both teachers and students required collecting insights from both perspectives. To ensure clarity, the data has been color-coded: orange represents student feedback, while yellow corresponds to teacher input.
Student feedback
Teacher feedback
The Challenge
Music students often hit roadblocks during practice sessions, like:
Questions about technique or assignments remain unresolved until their next lesson.
Lack of Motivation: Slow progress, frustration, and bad habits lead to discouragement.: Slow progress, frustration, and bad habits lead to discouragement.
Ineffective Practice: Students practice what’s fun (repertoire) and avoid essential elements like scales or etudes.
Music teachers struggle with:
Students ignoring written assignments in physical notebooks.
Limited visibility into how their students practice during the week.
Juggling separate tools for tuning, metronomes, note-taking, and progress tracking.
Research Goal
Understand how to motivate students to practice more effectively and ensure productive communication between lessons.
What role does practice play in a student’s life?
How do physical notebooks currently support practice routines?
Would tools like digital assignments, tuners, metronomes, and reminders improve practice?
Are students comfortable reaching out to teachers between lessons?
Key Research Questions
Research Methods
Checking Out Our Competitors
Compared 4 existing apps (Andante, Modacity, Music Practice Tool, Tonic)
Finding: None provided all-in-one solutions tailored for student-teacher communication.
Built in practice tools
Student + teacher communication
Free
Progress tracker
Ability to challenge friends
Social component
Built for all ages
Two tiered-built for teacher and student
Personalization features
Andante
Modacity
Music Practice Tool
Tonic
My Solution
Surveys and Interviews
Participants: 3 music teachers, 3 music students
Data grouped into affinity maps to uncover patterns.
Qualitative Interviews
Teacher Interviews
I interviewed three private lesson teachers, each with a different level of experience.
-McKenna Glorioso,
Suzuki Teacher
Making regular progress between lessons is so important-students are establishing self discipline and routine!
-Lisa Goldman,
Suzuki Teacher
I encourage students to be part of the assignment process- you always get a better end result that way. By taking their own notes, they have accountability for what they need to accomplish that week.
-Ellie Glorioso,
Suzuki Teacher
Someone is always taking notes in a notebook. Generally, the parent takes the notes so the student and I can work. If the parent isn’t present, I’ll take notes, but they’re not as thorough as I’d like-it’s easy for specifics to get lost and forgotten.
Student Interviews
I interviewed three music students, each at a different skill level and with varying lengths of lesson experience.
-Sofia Clark,
Violin student
Having a visual representation of the practice process would be really helpful. Even if I feel discouraged about a practice session not going great, I can still take pride in the fact that I got better at the skill of playing and practicing.
-Marley Metzger.
Violin student
I track my practice time with a handwritten chart for validation. It’s satisfying to fill out a whole piece of paper and motivating to see all the days I’ve practiced and notice improvements from point A to B.
-Grace Ochenjele,
Viola student
Practicing can be vulnerable for me. It exposes my bad habits. I usually play the things I know really well instead of working on the tricky parts. I wish I knew how to “lock in” and really get something accomplished each time. I can feel aimless!
Persona Development
I designed two personas (one for teachers and one for students) to serve as a cumulative representation of all the common user needs, goals, thoughts, feelings, pain points and actions into account, that I derived from interviews and insights.
Teacher Persona
Sam Sands
Suzuki Cello Instructor
32
Cello
Years teaching: 10
“Progress over perfection”
Frequently used apps:
Motivations
Keep music lessons a fun and positive part of a student’s life
Help kids make a little bit of progress every day
Help kids achieve a realistic practice routine
Frustrations
Students making a habit of not practicing the weekly assignment
Students forgetting their notebook: results in confusion of where they left off last time, what the student’s assignment was, having to take notes somewhere else-losing the consistency of weekly notes in their notebook.
Students who wait until their next lesson to ask a question
Dealing with difficult parents
They’re looking for an all-in one app that:
Helps students practice more effectively
Doesn’t distract the student from practicing productively
Helps students and parents access the weekly assignment in a virtual way
Has ways for students to ask questions or for teachers to offer help between lessons.
Student Persona
Clara Doherty
16
Violin
Years taking lessons: 12
I like healthy competition with my orchestra friends-we’re always pushing ourselves and each other to get better!
Motivations
Improve her playing to stay competitive with her youth orchestra friends
Keep music part of her daily life
Make a little bit of progress every day
Daily streaks: practicing for any many consecutive days as possible
Frustrations
Keeping a steady routine
Balance practice time with her studies, sports and extra curricular activities
Finding methods of practice that work really well for her
Staying focused
She’s looking for an all-in one app that:
Tuner, metronome, tempo slow mo all in the same place
Easy way to see what exactly she needs to practice
Practice checklist (likes checking things off as she goes!)
A way to see if her other friends are practicing too
How might we design a platform that supports both teachers and students by making daily practice more effective, progress tracking effortless, and motivation personalized and engaging?
Opportunity Areas
User Goals
For Students:
Create a tool where students can view their weekly assignments, communicate with their teacher and friends, and track their progress with gamification and rewards.
For Teachers:
Create an intuitive tool to assign work, answer questions, and track student progress.
Feature Set
Designing for two distinct user groups required ensuring that many of the app’s features worked seamlessly together. Once I identified the essential features for a minimum viable product (MVP), I moved on to working out the sitemap and the user flows.
P1: Must Have
Built in metronome, tuner, drone, do not disturb feature
Ability to send/view weekly assignments
Personalization
Messaging platform
Streaks/accountability encouragement
Checklists
P2: Nice to Have
Progress bar
Practice timers
Practice log-for students to submit and teachers to review
Ability to work with Google Drive and Forescore apps
Progress tracker for teachers: A space to keep dedicated notes about each student and their individual progress.
P3: Surprising and Delightful
Rewards/gamification
Parent mode-for younger students
P4: Can come later
Real-time practice reminders
Teacher library where they can use recurring templates/notes
User Flows and Site Maps
With a wide range of features available in the app, I focused on highlighting the most essential ones for teachers and students: conducting a practice session (student) and sending a weekly assignment (teacher). Ensuring these core tasks are easy to navigate is crucial, especially given the broad age range of users. The simpler the experience for both students and teachers of all ages, the more successful the app will be.
Teacher Site Map
Student Site Map
Student User Flow
Teacher User Flow
Duple Style Tile
Icons
Bottom Navigation
Practice
Dashboard
Profile
Connect
Bottom Navigation -Selected
Practice
Dashboard
Profile
Connect
Practice tools
Metronome
Timer
Tuner
Streak
Do not disturb
Add section
Other
Awards
Check boxes
Arrows
Button options-Primary
Disabled
Back
Default
Practice
F6703F
Primary
Logo
duple
Logo
Fredoka
Header 1
Lato, 32px, Bold
Header 2
Lato, 24px, Bold
Header 3
Lato, 20, Semibold
Body text
Lato, 16, Regular
NAV 1
Lato, 14, Regular
NAV 2
Lato, 14, BOLD
Time to practice!
Tuesday, November 5
Scales
Arpeggios
Whistler
Etude
Review
Working piece
Finish practice session
Next
Scale: G Major
10
Ringing tone
No swells-even bow speed, smooth bow changes
Intonation
Shifting: Isolate descending shift on E string from C-B 5x in a row.
Drone
Metronome
?
Ask for help
Connect
Practice
Dashboard
Profile
3
5
6:30
FDFBF3
BCB8B2
1D1B1C
Neutrals
4B407C
C50A2E
EA1C1F
FFBF57
FFEE72
Secondary
F6703F
Primary
Branding
Learning a musical instrument is a meaningful investment—of time, money, and personal energy. While the journey should be fun and motivating, it can sometimes feel discouraging when progress stalls or growth feels out of reach. Duple was created to help bridge that gap by making practice more engaging, productive, and rewarding for students of all ages—and the teachers who guide them.
When naming the app, I wanted something that felt approachable and relaxed without leaning too childish, given the app’s wide-ranging audience. After exploring many options, I landed on Duple. In music, a duple is a rhythmic pattern felt in twos—a concept that resonated with the collaborative nature of the app and the ongoing partnership between student and teacher.
To reflect Duple’s core values—Fun, Motivating, Productive, Progress, and Growth—I chose orange as the primary accent color, supported by other bright, energetic hues. Orange evokes enthusiasm, creativity, and warmth, aligning perfectly with the positive emotional experience we want users to have. The vibrant color palette reinforces the idea that learning music should feel joyful and forward-moving, not rigid or overwhelming.
Sketching
Iterations
duple
duple
duple
duple
Finalized Logo
duple
Low-Fidelity Testing
I created the first prototype to get feedback from people-it was a basic version of the app with four features, two for each tier of the app. Tasks 1 (Conducting a practice session) and 2 (Challenging a friend) were to be approached from the student’s perspective and tasks 3 (Assigning work to a student) and 4 (Responding to a parent’s inquiry) were to be approached from the teacher’s perspective.
Task 1: Navigate through the app as a student and conduct a practice session. Finish the tas by logging how the pracrice session went.
Insight from testing:
The practice button would be better situated in the middle of the nav bar since it’s the main “action” of the app.
Is it possible to start a practice session and come back to it later?
Task 2: Navigate through the app as a student. Find a friend to connect with and challenge them to a practice challenge.
Insight from testing:
5 of the 7 participants said they would use this feature regularly. The two that said no mentioned that while they wouldn’t use it personally, they can see students in middle/high school really enjoying it and finding it motivating.
Some participants were confused by the concept of the practice challenge, wanting more clarification and details before committing to a challenge.
There was a broad spectrum of ideas with this task-some are highly motivated and competitive and would want to use it and win every week. Others would want to use it more casually to keep accountable with themselves and a friend, or turn the solitary act of practicing into a fun social/virtual event. Others prefer to keep their practice time private.
Task 3: Navigate through the app as a teacher and assign work to a student.
Insight from testing:
Users would prefer a summary of what happened in the last lesson on the front screen of the student profile, instead of the latest messages.
It took a while to find the ‘submit assignment’ button. Having a bigger CTA is necessary since it’s the main action of the page.
There was some confusion with wording-often students are the ones submitting assignments, not teachers. Maybe teachers “send work” or “send assignment”?
Users really liked how teachers could see how much students have done in the week leading up to their lesson-keeps everyone honest.
Users wanted to find a way to automate the process for teachers (questionnaire on the lesson to measure progress without having to write so much)
Wants students to get a phone notification when the teacher has uploaded their assignment and notes for the week.
Really like the ‘at a glance’ page!
Likes that this would help keep things more organized for the teacher.
Prototyping
Moderated tests:
2 Music Teachers
2 Music Students
Unmoderated tests:
13 users
Objectives
Assess how easily users (both teachers and students) navigate the app’s core features
Evaluate the intuitiveness of the app through 4 different flows
Gather feedback on visual elements, effectiveness and usefulness of the app
Identify areas of improvement to enhance usability and function
High-Fidelity Testing
Because Duple is a two tiered app with engagement from teachers and students, I wanted to gather as much data as possible. I felt it was important to get perspectives from music teachers and music students, but also from users who might not have experience playing instruments or taking lessons-to see if the app is truly user friendly and intuitive to those who might not have a music background.
All 18 users rated the task on a scale from 1 (very difficult) to 5 (very easy), with an average score of 4.81.
Task 1: Conducting a practice session (perspective of student)
Goal: Test if the user could complete a practice session, submit a question to their teacher, and fill out their practice evaluation, smoothly.
Users appreciated:
The attached videos with teacher demonstrations
Checkboxes
Screenshots of practice spots
Ease of navigation
Playful but clear layout
Users identified areas for improvement:
Confused by the question button when submitting a question to a teacher.
All 18 users rated the task on a scale from 1 (very difficult) to 5 (very easy), with an average score of 4.92.
Task 3: Assign work to a student (perspective of teacher)
Goal: Test if the user could successfully assign work to their student, Liam Martin.
Users appreciated:
How easily they could find the student they were looking for
How the student pops up and coordinates with the calendar
How well designed and user friendly the app is, even for those who are new to music or not tech-savvy. They could see teachers of any age adapting to this technology.
Likes the idea of columns with tasks, editable format for more customization with students.
Users identified areas for improvement:
Making as many things automatic for the teacher as possible-voice transcription button might be nice so they don’t have to type as much during the lesson.
Grouping similar things for students (like all book 1 students, book 2 students) would be good so you don’t have to type the same things every week.
Wants each section of the assignment to be editable or look editable.
Some copy was confusing. “Submit” vs “send” assignment.
“I would love assigning work to my students like this!”
All 18 users rated the task on a scale from 1 (very difficult) to 5 (very easy), with an average score of 4.82
Task 2: Challenge a friend to a practice challenge (perspective of student)
Goal: Test if the user could successfully challenge a friend to a practice session.
Users appreciated:
The scoring principle is the same as apple fitness, so people can have different goals and still compete fairly.
Ease of navigation
Users identified areas for improvement:
Some users were confused how to win a challenge.
Would other friend’s achievements would be more noticeable? Or would have to individually seek them out?
Would it be possible to set the specific goals for the challenge?
This task caused the most confusion for users. All 18 users rated the task on a scale from 1 (very difficult) to 5 (very easy), with an average score of 3.9
Task 4: Respond to a parent’s inquiry (perspective of teacher)
Goal: Test if the user could successfully find and respond to a message from a student’s parent.
Users appreciated:
Facilitating communication between parents and teachers is a great idea, especially in the same place where they can all view assignments and previously asked questions.
Users identified areas for improvement:
There doesn’t seem to be one clear way to find unread messages.
It looks like there’s multiple avenues to complete this task, but no intuitively clear way.
Having a notification on the dashboard or as part of the footer would be helpful-right now there isn’t a way to know if you have any unread messages from students.
Will the teacher get a notification from the app when someone sends them a message? OR will there be an alert function on the dashboard page?
“I’d need an alert when a new message came in or else I’d miss them completely!”
Final Revisions
Cleaning up copy and facilitating automation for teachers assigning work
Users were confused with the wording of “Submit Assignment”. Shouldn’t the students be submitting work (practicing)? Revised wording on the CTA shows that teachers will be sent to the place where they write down the assignment the students are expected to practice that week.
The ability to dictate notes will help teachers who want to automate the assignment process.
Being able to set metronome goals and a drone note for each part of the weekly assignment will help each student know exactly how to approach each task.
Before
After
Adding ease and alerts to the communication system.
When there’s no way to know what messages are waiting to be addressed, they can easily be overlooked or missed. With an active notification alert, the pop-up stays until all messages have been responded to.
Before
After
Clarifying details of a practice challenge.
Duple follows in the Apple Watch’s footsteps with its equitable challenge mode. People of different abilities and practice tasks can compete fairly by earning points when they work towards their individual goals. Seeing a friend’s goals before they initiate a challenge gives them more assurance and clarity of what the challenge will look like before they begin.
Conducting a practice session-asking for help.
Users were confused by the wording of ‘Question’. Should they press it if they having a practice issue? If there’s an issue with the app itself? Rewording it to ‘Ask for help’ signals that they can submit a query directly to their teacher about their practice issue.
Added a notification system for the student-facing UI to alert them to messages from their teacher or friends.
Before
After
Final Solution
Duple bridges the communication gap between music teachers and students, guiding effective, consistent practice.
For Students:
Step-by-step practice sessions tailored to teacher instructions.
Gamified features: challenges, streaks, and awards.
Built-in tools (metronome, tuner) for streamlined practice.
Easy communication with teachers and friends.
For Teachers:
Send weekly assignments with tools (metronome, tuner, video notes).
Track progress with practice session reviews.
Manage calendars, profiles, and answer student queries.
Students complete more sessions per week.
Reduced wait times for questions.
Teachers report measurable improvement.
