Designing Musico: From Idea to a Live Product
4 years as the sole designer of an online music teaching platform, serving 2K weekly active users worldwide
My Role
Sole Product Designer
Device
Web · Tablet · Mobile
Impact
2K weekly active users
What is Musico?
Musico is an all-in-one platform designed to help music schools and teachers provide extraordinary teaching experiences. Over 4 years as the sole designer, I was responsible for every layer of the product — from early ideation through to a live product with real customers across the US and Europe. This included the product itself, the design system, marketing materials, and ongoing usability testing with real users.
The Studio:
A Lesson Builder for Every Teacher
The Studio is Musico's lesson-building tool — a modular canvas where teachers create and share teaching units composed of up to five content types: written instructions, sheet music, audio recordings, video, and an interactive whiteboard.
The design challenge was significant: a lesson can be as simple as a few written instructions, or as rich as a full package of notation files, audio channels, instructional video, and worksheet templates. The Studio had to support both extremes without making either feel like a compromise.
The bigger challenge: Musico serves music teachers across completely different instruments: guitar, drums, trumpet, piano — each with their own materials, workflows, and expectations. The system needed to feel tailored to each of them, while being built from a single shared architecture.
My approach was research-driven from the start. I worked closely with teachers from the US and Europe — observing how they built lessons, understanding their workflows, and testing assumptions in real time. That research shaped every decision about the building blocks: what each content type needed to support, how much flexibility to allow, and where structure was actually helpful.
The Notebook:
A Student's Learning Timeline
The Notebook gives students a single place to track all their assignments and progress over time — organized by topics, searchable, and accessible on any device. For teachers, it's a tool for organizing assignments, adding notes and weekly practice tips, and tracking student engagement through practice time and session data.
Before Musico, teachers sent resources by email or SMS, students lost their notebooks, and there was no way to detect when a student was struggling. The Notebook replaced all of that with a structured, persistent, and shared learning record.
Research & Usability Testing
As the sole designer, I owned the full research cycle. Every 4 weeks, at the end of each iteration, I planned and conducted usability tests with real users — teachers and students from the US and Europe, both online and in person. The process was structured: set goals, write a script with 2 core tasks, prepare mockups, schedule 20-30 minute sessions, record everything, find patterns, and iterate.
One test that shaped the product significantly: while redesigning Musico's lesson library, we envisioned a Netflix-style interface with endless content categories. Teachers loved the idea in theory — but in testing, it backfired. They were browsing during actual lessons with students, not in their free time. Too many options created confusion, not delight. We responded by introducing focused categories instead of endless carousels. That decision came entirely from watching real users struggle.
Marketing Design
As the sole designer, my work extended beyond the product. I was responsible for all of Musico's visual output — campaign ads for Facebook and Instagram, social media templates for product updates, testimonials, and seasonal campaigns. Working closely with the Head of Marketing, I developed visual concepts and ad variables for each campaign, translating product messages into Musico's colorful, approachable visual language.
Reflections
4 years as a sole designer taught me that ownership is both a privilege and a responsibility. When you're the only designer, every decision — from information architecture to button labels — is yours to make and defend. That kind of end-to-end exposure accelerated my growth in ways that a larger team might not have.
Working directly with real users throughout the process changed how I think about design. The teachers I spoke with shaped the product in ways I couldn't have anticipated from a brief. Research wasn't a phase — it was a practice.