Presto
Streamlining Rehearsals for Orchestras and Ensembles
Timeline:
7 Week Sprint
Toolkit:
Figma
Maze
Role:
Product Designer
UX Researcher
Product Manager
Team:
5 UI/UX Designers
5 Full-Stack Engineers
2 Product Managers
🤔 The Problem
Rehearsals are chaotic, music gets lost, section edits are unclear, and musicians jump between apps just to stay in sync, so as a longtime ensemble leader, I saw firsthand how inefficient rehearsals become when there’s no centralized, musician-friendly system for scores, notes, and communication.
🙌 Solution Preview
Presto is a collaborative music platform designed to eliminate rehearsal confusion and keep musicians in sync—before, during, and after practice.
Shareable Library
Musicians can instantly access their music from a centralized library. Directors upload parts once, and members can retrieve them without digging through email threads or outdated links.
Annotation & Practice Tools
With an intuitive suite of musical markup tools, players can add bowings, fingerings, dynamics, and reminders—right on their part. No more pencil smudges or lost paper notes.
Plus, built-in practice features like a metronome, tuner, and drone help musicians stay in tune, in time, and fully prepared for rehearsal.
Transferrable
Note-Taking
Whether it’s a sectional or full ensemble, "Jam" lets players annotate in real time during rehearsal—so they can focus on the music instead of scrambling for a pencil. Notes are shared on transparent, customizable layers, meaning each musician can pick and choose which markings to keep. No more messy photocopies or confusing edits—just clean, tailored parts that keep everyone in sync.
🎵 From Musicians, For Musicians
Every member of the Presto team is a musician—we’ve rehearsed in orchestras, led ensembles, and lived through the same frustrations: missing edits, outdated scores, and messy communication that wastes precious rehearsal time. These weren’t abstract problems to us—they were part of our day-to-day musical lives.
That shared background shaped everything we built. Because we deeply understood the workflow, we were able to move quickly, ask the right questions during research, and design Presto around the real needs of musicians like us. This wasn’t just a project—it was something we all cared about solving.
🔎 Confirming the Problem
We interviewed 9 musicians and directors across ensembles, jazz groups, and university orchestras. Our early discovery process revealed consistent frustrations:
"I feel annoying when I have to
bother my leader for markings."
SAXOPHONIST
"A lot of students don't have the latest version of the score."
CONDUCTOR
"I have five apps open during
rehearsals and practice.
It’s too much."
PIPAIST
👤 Musician Personas
Using our interviews, we developed key personas to represent different user needs. These personas capture the goals, frustrations, and workflows of core users such as section leaders and conductors. They help guide product decisions by ensuring Presto addresses real, high-impact pain points in ensemble coordination.
Occupation:
Student
Tech Comfort Level: High
Devices Used:
iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, iPhone
Preferred Apps: ForScore, Google Drive, Notability
Benjamin Starr
Role: Cello Section Leader
Age: 19
Background: Benjamin is a student of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and plays in a professional youth orchestra. He’s tech-savvy, leads the cello section, and often juggles rehearsal prep with bow-marking responsibilities. Benjamin values efficiency and clarity and is often the bridge between the conductor and his section.
Goals & Needs:
-
Efficiently distribute and apply bowing or articulation changes across his section.
-
Avoid manual writing; wants digital markings that sync and save time.
-
Get notified immediately when any edits or cuts are made to scores.
-
Quickly compare updated versions of parts or scores.
-
Annotate shared music files without re-uploading or re-sharing them manually.
Frustrations:
-
Last-minute edits not shared with him.
-
Rewriting bowings multiple times across printed parts.
-
Section members using outdated scores.
Occupation:
College Music Director
Tech Comfort Level: Moderate
Devices Used:
Windows Laptop, iPad
Preferred Apps:
PDF readers, Email
Hua Chang
Role: Orchestra Director & Conductor
Age: 65
Background: Ms. Chang is a seasoned conductor of both school and community orchestras. She’s detail-oriented, passionate about preparation, and values rehearsal time being spent on musicality—not logistics. She uses digital tools but prefers them to be simple and centralized.
Goals & Needs:
-
Get a top-down dashboard of all scores and their readiness.
-
Track who has seen edits, who’s marked up their part, and who hasn’t.
-
Make global cuts or rehearsal notes that push instantly to the full ensemble.
-
Avoid repetitive emailing, printing, or re-uploading new versions.
-
Keep an archive of all score edits and rehearsal notes.
Frustrations:
-
Not knowing who is using the wrong version.
-
Endless rounds of emailing PDFs.
-
Wasting time in rehearsals clarifying logistics.
📚 Competitor Analysis
Before jumping into anything, using the interviews we had with musicians, we analyzed existing tools that musicians commonly use for rehearsals—both purpose-built and repurposed.
Before jumping into anything, using the interviews we had with musicians, we analyzed existing tools that musicians commonly use for rehearsals—both purpose-built and repurposed.
Google Drive
✅ Easy to share files with others
❌ No annotations, music tools, or version tracking—causes confusion in rehearsals
Goodnotes & Notability
✅ Great general PDF markup and handwriting tools
❌ Not music-specific; lacks practice tools and live collaboration features
ForScore
✅ Robust tools for annotation, page turning, and solo practice
❌ No support for shared edits or ensemble coordination
❌ Expensive, at $24.99/user
Presto
✅ Built-in music tools: metronome, tuner, drone, and customizable annotation layers
✅ Direct note sharing: players can share annotations straight onto each other's parts, no copying or re-uploading
✅ Designed for ensembles: directors upload once, players access instantly
✅ Smart library: organize, tag, and personalize parts without version confusion
I pushed our team to focus on features that streamline rehearsals—helping us define Presto’s edge: combining the best of existing tools, tailored for real-time musical collaboration.
These insights guided our core principles:
Everything in
one place
Section-wide
visibility
Minimal tap,
maximum clarity
🧠 Brainstorming Features & Defining Our Scope
Using our core principles as a guide, we brainstormed features based on user interviews and our own experiences as musicians. In a collaborative whiteboard session, we surfaced common pain points like messy part markings and last-minute edits. These insights led to ideas like real-time annotations, built-in metronomes, and smarter music libraries—all grounded in real rehearsal needs.
Prioritizing Core Features
After our team-wide sketching and ideation session, I led the effort to evaluate which features were feasible within our 7-week sprint timeline. While everyone brought incredible ideas to the table, I organized our brainstormed concepts into tiers based on impact, complexity, and user value. From there, I guided the team toward a focused feature set that balanced ambition with execution—prioritizing real-time annotations, practice tools, and a centralized music library as our MVP foundation.
🗺️ Mapping Out User Flows
After brainstorming features grounded in real musician needs, we moved on to mapping the core user journey for a typical rehearsal: accessing music, making annotations, and sharing updates with section members. Our goal was to make this flow intuitive and fast, reducing the friction musicians often face during practice.
We also explored a more detailed interface for directors, imagining a robust dashboard to assign music, track edits, and message sections.
‼️‼️ BUT, AFTER WE RAN OUR IDEAS BY ADDITIONAL ENSEMBLE DIRECTORS...
We pivoted—realizing that most directors don’t want more tools to manage. They just need a simple, no-fuss way to get updated music to their players. This insight led us to streamline the director experience into a lightweight “Send to Ensemble” flow, prioritizing speed and flexibility—even enabling students to easily share music for small group ensembles.
☝️ Finalizing Core Features
After our team-wide ideation and mapping session, I led the evaluation of which features were feasible within our 7-week sprint. I organized ideas by impact, complexity, and user value, then guided the team toward our core features:
🎼 Shareable Music Library
Access your sheet music anytime, anywhere. Directors upload once, and performers can instantly retrieve parts from a centralized library—no more sifting through outdated emails or broken links.
✏️ Smart Annotation & Practice Tools
Presto includes intuitive markup tools for bowings, fingerings, dynamics, and personal notes—all directly on your digital part. Plus, built-in practice tools like a metronome, tuner, and drone ensure musicians stay in tune and on tempo during independent practice.
🔁 Transferrable Notetaking
Annotations appear on transparent, toggleable layers, so users can pick and choose the notes they want. No more messy photocopies or irrelevant edits—just clean, personalized music.
✏️ Lo-fi & Mid-fi Designs
🎨 Design System
🎨 Logo Ideation
Our logo is inspired by the visual language of musical notation—drawing from the clean lines of note stems, ties, and dynamic markings to create a form that feels familiar to musicians yet modern and minimal. The name Presto, meaning “very fast” in musical terms, perfectly aligns with our mission to streamline rehearsals and reduce friction in ensemble workflows. Just like the tempo marking, Presto represents speed, clarity, and forward momentum—all reflected in both our design and product philosophy.
🖌️ Iconography
To maintain a cohesive and intuitive interface, we designed custom icons for tools that didn’t have clear, universal symbols—like the tuner, metronome, and drone. Since visual clarity was key, we tested multiple icon variations by asking musicians to identify each one at first glance. Their feedback helped us choose the most recognizable and intuitive designs, ensuring users could quickly find the tools they needed without second-guessing.
Metronome
Tuner
Drone
Final Design & Prototype
Full Application Walkthrough
🧠 What I Learned
-
Musicians need tools that don’t distract from playing—speed and minimal UI are key
-
Annotation UX is tricky—users want both precision and speed
-
Building real-time syncing across users requires deep coordination between design and backend
This project deepened my experience in:
-
Designing for musicians with varied tech comfort levels
-
Prototyping complex tools like in-sheet annotation
-
Leading product research rooted in my own lived experience
🙌 Special Thanks
Team:
Sophie Chen, James Zhang, Annmarie Jessil, Anya Chen, Daniel Mastick, Kenny Luu, Anthoney Xie, Bethany Kim, Ronald Lu, Wennan Liu, and Kaylen Ho
Program:
Creative Labs at UCLA
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