Ultimate Guitar is the worlds most successful guitar tabs app, with over 300M users. I was brought on board to head up product design for the company as they were aggressively evolving their offering towards a User Generated Content approach, with new features planned and a new brand to achieve this.
My key responsibilities were managing 3 designers, collaborating with the CEO and Head of Product on product strategy and feature ideation, owning all user research activities and managing timelines and deliverables.
This was also a very hands on role, and I was heavily involved in designing, prototyping and conducting testing for the updates and features I was involved with.
During my time at Ultimate Guitar I oversaw the ideation, build and release of several strategic updates and features to their products across both app and web. These included the launch of 'Shots', a new feature to encourage video-based UGC, a total rework of the app architecture to accommodate new UGC and learning features that had been shoe horned into the experience and 'Stickers', a concept for gamifying the product that tested well during research.
Our efforts in launching 'Shots' to encourage user-generated content was a great success, and resulted in users logging in over 20% more often and spending far more time in the app (+30%).
My work to redesign the app architecture (and some of the web experiences) was also successful, as it resulted in more interaction with the areas of the app that we wanted users to focus on, whilst at the same time making the key journeys easier (according to task analysis sessions I conduced during user testing).
Another outcome that wasn't directly associated with KPI's was the up-skilling of the other product designers as when I arrived there was no research function and no user research was conducted. When I left, the designers had had some exposure to the methods I used and were more confident in running their own research.
