Designing a music education app from scratch for kids and adults

Pitch was born from the imagination of two cultural action coordinators at Armada Productions, a French cultural organization that uses artistic projects to engage and educate local communities. With a clear vision but no product expertise, they turned to our team to help them turn the idea into something real.

Our mission was to structure the project from the ground up, from understanding future users to designing a functional POC. Working hand in hand with the coordinators, we brought a design process to a project that had never had one.

Using artistic projects to engage and educate

L’Armada Productions is an association that fosters children's imagination and creativity through music, offering shows, events, creative workshops, and radio programs.

Starting from zero with 2 coordinators and proto-personae

We kicked off with a proto-persona workshop to map out the desires, motivations, and obstacles of future users. The challenge here was real: children and adults don't interact with an app the same way, don't have the same expectations, and don't respond to the same design patterns. Getting that distinction right from the start was essential to avoid building something that worked for neither.

Competitive analysis and graphic research to find Pitch's own visual identity

Before touching a single screen, we took a step back to understand what already existed, both in terms of competing products and visual references, like GarageBand, Incredibox or Soundtrap. This phase helped us identify gaps in the market and gave us a clearer sense of where Pitch could carve out its own identity.

Generating screen ideas before touching a single wireframe

Armed with research and insights, we ran a Crazy 8 ideation workshop to rapidly explore screen concepts. The goal wasn't to find the perfect solution immediately, but to generate enough divergent ideas to make informed decisions before committing to a direction.

Interactive prototypes tested with real users to observe, not assume

We translated the most promising concepts into interactive prototypes and put them in front of potential users. Rather than asking what they thought, we watched what they did, their hesitations, their instincts, and their confusion were just as informative as their words. The greatest part about testing screens with children was that they were really honest.

Reshuffling 4 core modules based on how users actually perceived each feature

Testing led to a key structural recommendation: reorganizing the app's four main modules, Make, Listen, Learn, and Play. The ToneMatrix, a grid-based music loop tool, is a good example: we had placed it in Make, but users consistently perceived it as a game. We recommended moving it to Play, a small change that made the overall architecture feel far more intuitive.

Challenges & results

When the visual direction doesn't land and why letting go was the right call

There was no major issue on this project, but one point of divergence was the app's visual direction. The client didn't fully connect with the graphic proposals we brought to the table. Since the project was still at the POC stage, we agreed to set that aside and land on a neutral design instead.

The client later reached out to illustrator Quentin Vuilleret to commission a logo and custom illustrations to bring the interfaces to life.

A user-centered POC that reshaped the client's own vision of the product

Thanks to our involvement from the very start of the project, we were able to design a user-centered app that perfectly met their current needs. We also realized that the client had a different perspective on the app’s structure, and their feedback was invaluable in refining the project’s coherence.