My showtime safety blanket: Ultimate Guitar
To be clear, I’m talking about the app. Unfortunately, I do not own the “ultimate guitar” or play proficiently enough to say I’m the ultimate, duuude.
But, I’m decent enough to have performed my fair share of shows, pre-COVID. Ultimate Guitar always came with me, stowed safely away in my iPad for moments when the band got a special request, we needed to stretch time by playing songs we weren’t as familiar with, or I forgot the lyrics… again.
To me, the app gets an A+ for functionality. It. gets. the. job. done.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with the product, Ultimate Guitar is a community where users can share chords and tabs for songs. You can look up songs by title or artist, and thanks to my paid subscription, I can save them and create playlists.
When I first started playing guitar, I could click on the chord and see how to play it, as well as all the different variations. & now, when I disagree with the chords, tsk tsk, I can edit the chart with the chords I prefer, and save it.
Unfortunately…
As much as I love & appreciate this app, I suspect that I would get some negative feedback about its usability and accessibility if I turned it in as a capstone project. So, I’m sorry if this stings Ultimate Guitar ❤, but I’m going to cut straight through to the chase.
Usability
There’s a lot of great visual feedbacks by way of affordances and the like, plus they’ve got lots of tools & resources for rookie guitar players. Even though I’ve used the product for over decade now, I discovered lots of cool features while writing this, such as this chord library!
But… nobody’s perfect. Let’s dive into my biggest pet peeve first.
The Autoscroll Feature (Heuristic: Efficiency)
The autoscroll feature is practically pointless in my opinion. Look, I understand what we’re going for here. The whole song generally can’t fit in one screen. So I bet someone on the team said, “Oh I know, let’s help them by providing an autoscroll!”
No!! The extra time it takes to figure out how fast it rolls so you can read the lyrics as they scroll by, but not too fast that you lose your spot… it’s too much! With all the technology out there, couldn’t we incorporate a metronome into the pacing of the scrolling? The arbitrary “0.1–1.5x speed” infuriates me. 1.5x speed compared to what?! Seriously,
I ended up signing up for the paid subscription for the editing features, so I could fit tabs into one screen on my iPad. I’m surprised I haven’t sprouted tufts of gray hairs from the times I spent trying to juggle playing, singing, learning the song, scrolling, band leading all at once. Boo.
Edited Tab vs. Original Tab Icons (Memorability)
As I mentioned before, you have the option to edit a crowd-sourced tab and save it as your own. However, when you go to select it from “My Tabs”, it is hard to distinguish which one is yours and which one is the original. The only thing that differentiates the two are the icons on the right of the screen, seen below.
Even as an avid user of the app, I still forget which one is which. & maybe you’re reading this and thinking well obviously it’s the one with the human icon, what’s wrong with you? But when you’re performing, you’re not taking the time to squint at tiny icons, and therefore I conclude we need a more distinct marker for edited tabs!! Hear hear!
How about a “What you were playing last” section? (Memorability)
Sometimes those random special requests from the crowd are a huge hit. Most times, I’m able to remember the name of the song, but sometimes, I just can’t. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would love to see the last 5 tabs I looked at or interacted with, because I can’t be the only one who forgets to favorite things immediately, right? …. right??
Accessibility
If you have young eyes and tiny fingers, this is the app for you! You may never notice how small the fonts or buttons are.
About three Christmas’ ago, I decided to give my dad some bass guitar method books, and sat down with him to show him how to go through a tab. Oh boy.
My dad is a tall guy with big, truck mechanic-calloused fingers. He’s also had a stroke, so his eyesight is not great. & despite his huge heart, he’s also not the most patient man out there.
…Let’s just say I get a little twitchy whenever I think of what to get my dad for Christmas now.
In conclusion
To wrap up, I’ll say this..
To whom it may concern at Ultimate Guitar, I’m finishing up my Designlab bootcamp this spring and I’ll be available for hire ;)
