Ultimate Guitar
Ultimate Guitar is a cornerstone of online guitar community, with a history spanning over 25 years. Chords, tabs, lyrics, playlists, lessons, and gear reviews—everything you need to support your guitar journey. For me, it truly was an honor to work on a project that I myself used as a teenager to learn how to play.
My responsibilities
Owned UX and product flows for the Ultimate Guitar mobile app. Was driving end-to-end product design from discovery to delivery: improving onboarding, engagement, usability and product-wide UX consistency.
Supported feature planning and prioritization through user research, A/B testing, and data-driven iterations.
Maintained and evolved design system and documentation to reduce cognitive load on the team and minimize design debt and legacy.
Achievements
Launched onboarding flow for beginner guitar players, increasing 7-day retention by 14% for new users who went through this flow and reducing first session drop-off by 18%
Designed and shipped the Songbooks section — a new subscription product that added a third revenue stream to the app. Results: +7% time per session, +3.5% returning users.
Delivered playlist flow improvements, increasing playlist creation 5× and reducing deletions 30–50% through improvements to playlist UX.
Improved tab page usability, reducing user complaints and support tickets.
Enhanced design system documentation, improving consistency and cutting cognitive load across the team.
Beginners onboarding flow
This is an onboarding mode for novice guitar players, who installed the app for the first time. We discovered that a churn rate for that cohort of users is higher in comparison to more experienced ones. The main hypotheses was that beginners are getting overwhelmed by all the app could give, so some guidance should take place.
The solution was to create a special onboarding process. On the first entry user choose a song from a guided list of popular but simple songs. That song is laid in a foundation a learning path: step-by-step user will be learning how to play this song starting with chords, than transitions between them and rhytm.
When learning a selected song, the user enters a controlled environment where it is always clear what to do next. In the process, they become accustomed to the process of learning a song. Instead of frustration, user gets enjoyment playing their first song.
Results:
Introduction of the beginners onboarding increased 7-day retention by 14% for new users who went through this flow
Also first session drop-off rate was decreased by 18% of new users in their first session, as beginners now had a clearer and more guided starting point.
23% of users finished all steps of the flow.
Fix usability issues on tab page
The “Tab” page is the purpose of the application: where chords and tabs are being viewed to play. However, its enormous legacy and lack of resources have led to this page receiving numerous complaints about feature accessibility and usability.
Together with an analyst, we checked qualitative feedback on this page to identify the most problematic areas. We checked quantitative data on feature usage frequency. One of the most major complaints was inaccessibility of tone transpose feature from the start.
Results:
We reformatted the page to address said complaints and make the main features more accessible.
User complaints and support tickets were reduced approximately by 12%, since we eliminated places that cause irritation in the main scenario of application use.
We have improved communication in the event of internet loss, making it clearer and easier to understand.
Increase of CR of Open official button, which is an important monetisation feature.
Playlist flow fixes
I helped make the app more collaborative, by updating playlists features. It’s incredibly moving to see how people use Ultimate Guitar to play music together—at rehearsals, birthday parties, on the street, or at concerts. This is a use case that's especially close to my heart, because I'm one of those people.
Results:
Playlist-specific behavior, improved significantly:
Playlists creation has increased more than 5 times per user for both platforms and more than 2 times in audience.
Playlists deletion has dropped by 30% per user for both platforms and more than 50% in audience
Easy way to find a favorite song
Ultimate Guitar is a library of millions of songs from tens of thousands of artists. Each song can contain multiple versions, such as different tones, chords, tabs, and separate song parts. I worked on various sections of the app to improve the search experience, helping users find the version they need.
Building songbooks section
Ultimate Guitar has a collection of nearly 3000 books about music and self-teaching guides. My task was to build a section in the app for them.
Results:
Introduction of a new subscription product for the App and a third revenue stream, since Songbooks is a paid content available on a separate subscription
Creation of the section increased engagement: +7% time per session, +3.5% returning users.