The problem

Some screens such as notations have little explanation which causes confusion. The tempo widget is not used to its full extent. Most users only use the tempo slider.

Go through the app.

First thing was first. With my team, we decided to try and go through the UI elements of the Yousician app and find what might we encounter when we get real localized text in. This meant mocking up old legacy designs in Figma and using Google Translate (Pseudo-translations as we called them) to see what could happen.

Go through the data.

When we decided what might need to go and what we thought should stay, we went to the Data Chapter to get real, hard data.

Document problems.

To entice stakeholders, I created lots of documentation on Confluence with my Pseudo-translations detailing all of the problem children I found while going through the app. The main “issue” we seemed to come into problems with was the pause menu during main game play.

The proposed solutions

Overlay it

We could use a pause screen from a newer instrument with no changes. However, we know guitar players tend to pause the screen to see the notes.

Split it up

We can change this slightly by adding this bottom bar to move the options off the screen and lighten the cover to still show that it’s paused but they can still see under.

Improve it

We’ll need some of the popup style options like in voice. These are minimally redesigned for the simplicity of using existing elements so we can get localization to work quicker.

The end product

We had our pause menu redesign

After releasing the new menu, the changes by the users I most want to see are the accessibility to the tempo adjuster in practice mode and the understanding of the options they can adjust during practicing.

Before it was so cluttered and tight, ideas and add-ons were collected over time in the gameplay mode, added by developers over the years. Hopefully, with this reorganization and design, it will be a better flow from users.