Muky is a tablet app that combines AI sound recognition and project on the keyboard to give children a fun practice experience and provide guidance to their parents on Pre-school Music Education.
For practice mode, children follow the instruction and animation that is projected on the keyboard to practice. They will be provided correction and reward if they make mistakes or complete practice.
The app has 3 features: a gamification design to grasp user attention and engage them in practice, a learning cycle and curriculum based on scientific studies, and a PME community that provides in-the-circle information to parents. After the high-fidelity prototype, I especially iterated on the problem of children’s low attention on music test pages.
This is a research-heavy project. It is designed based on extensive user research on children, parents, and education providers through surveys, interviews, and observation. The system design also takes reference from PME research and expert interviews.
The project attended HKTech300, an entrepreneurship program, and received high comments from the judges.
The project went through 3 rounds of iteration with user tests and received 82% of user satisfaction.
Individual
Jan - April, 2021
Qualitative & quantitative user research; User testing; Market & Competitor Analysis; UI animation; Literature review; Persona;
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When parents are guiding their children to practice piano at home, the app provides a gamified way to turn the boring assignments into activities that children can enjoy. As the projector projects the practice content directly to the keyboard, children can have more physical engagement, which helps them be more focused on the task. During the practice, the AI sound recognition provides timely correction or encouragement that boost learning efficiency. The info section of the app provides useful PME guides, communities and consulting service to help parents learn and implement PME better at home.
Staying in orchestras for more than 8 years, I found huge difference between children who received adequate pre-school music education (PME) and those who did not. Those who received PME, no matter piano, violin or just singing and dancing according to rhythm, had greater passion as well as talent towards music. They tend to learn better and even turn music into their life-long career. However, most of the cases I witnessed were children who were sent with no previous experience, sololy due to the hope of their parents to let their kids master one instrument. They were relectant to trainning and gave up soon. Therefore, I think PME is an important issue to be advocated to provide more possibilities to children. With newly-emerging difficulty due to COVID-19, the experience of domestic PME is at stake, which can be improved through UX research and design.
