04 The Donovan's piano room
Designing a music e-learning platform and making it accessible to every child.
The brief
The Donovan's Piano Room is an inclusive learning platform initiative dedicated to making music education accessible to disadvantaged children in the USA.
The goal was to create an accessible and gamified platform achieving AA or AAA web accessiblity standards with a smooth onboarding process.
The problem
How might we design a music learning web platform so intuitive and engaging that children stay motivated to practice over time?
The key insights
The importance of Music education for children & teenagers
Music education lays the groundwork for children's academic success by fostering critical thinking, improving literacy and math skills, and increasing graduation rates.
American Psychological Association, 2019
Music learning powerfully fosters individual self-efficacy (the deep inner belief in one's capacity to achieve tasks), confidence, and self-esteem.
The Goopy & MacArthur Review, 2025
How digital platforms help in the music learning process
Modern music education increasingly relies on a diverse ecosystem of digital platforms, with mobile applications comprising 40% of the medium, followed closely by computer software and console-based engines.
While these interactive frameworks accelerate perceptual auditory skills and theoretical site-reading, researchers emphasize a distinct tactile transfer gap when children transition from touchscreens to physical, acoustic instruments.
Wang & Zheng, 2024
Parents main preoccupations around their children learning music
based on 5 user interviews
Learning music for brain development
"My kids all have to learn an instrument. It's just what we do. It's good for them and for their brain development and mental development and psychological development."
Maintaining kids' interest on playing music
"The one thing that sets good music makers is practice and time put in, but you need to enjoy and want to do this so much that you forget its even called practicing"
Music helping kids in focusing
My son with ADHD struggled a lot to learn piano, but has worked hard at it for three years now and I feel it has helped his focus so much.
The design
The admin onboarding flow
We came-up with 4 admin profiles: parent, teacher, principal and administrator.
The goal was to showcase diversity and also ease the onboarding process for our users.
Parents or institutions can create an admin account to add a child or a list of children that will have access to the platform.
We decided to add a bulk subscription to avoid friction while connecting students to an admin account.
Gamification on the platform
As highlighted in the Design research, gamification and the possibility to touch and practice is really important in a child learning process.
We added these elements in the platform and tried to recreate as realistically as possible the virtual environment of a piano lesson.
Key learnings
Make it immersive but simple
Too much interactivity can lose the child attention and his learning efficiency may decrease.
Learning should not be boring
Designing for children has to be fun, gamified and with a customed artistic direction.
A streamlined flow is better than multiple flows
Making the onboarding as seamless and clear as possible was key to avoid back and forth communication.
Next steps
Validate at scale
The new platform was just launched so we need to ensure the onboarding flow is working well.
Learn and improve
Collecting feedback with the dev teams, the design teams is working continuously to improve the platform and clear the bugs.
Extend the platform to institutions
Extending at a large-scale to schools and institutions to gain more impact.
