Guitar! by smule

In 2013 I joined the guitar development team. A majority of the designs were already established but we were challenged with how to evolve the product.

GUITAR CAROUSEL

Select different guitars themed the UI & guitar playing experience.

At launch we released with three guitars (with their appropriate sound fonts) and over time added two more guitars to add a variety of guitar vibes creating a fun mix-and-match experience.

With more available guitars, we iterated on the carousel to be scalable and used it as an opportunity emphasize visuals that corresponded with each guitar.

GUITAR FX PEDALS

We offered FX-pedals for our iPad users that allowed for more creativity.

We iterated on how to make the digital knobs feel intuitive by supporting three different gestures: swiping up/down, swiping left/right & radial-turn to adjust an FX pedal.

Feature Announcement

PROJECT Artifacts

Guitar Carousel - documentation on how we planned to ‘stitch’ together the backgrounds that rotated into place with each respective guitar
Studio Mode (never shipped) - in early 2014 we explored ways to create content within the guitar application. This was the precursor to the Community Content Tool & Composer.

Engineering: Joshua Wu, Jessie Chen, Joel Davis

Visual Design: Hanna Meija Beaton

UX Design: Chuck Espeleta

Product: Kevin Sung