Do U-tune your ukulele?

4 min readJan 25, 2021

Maybe a mobile tuner would help?

As I was doing a group project for General Assembly course, I realised that most of my projects required light mode UI. I decided to challenge myself and create a dark mode app instead.

Dark mode activated

I looked at my ukulele in a black solid case and figured out that a mobile tuner would look elegant and cool in a dark mode.

I didn’t want to use the popular dark grey for this project. I felt that dark brown would be better as it resembles the stunning wood the ukuleles are made of.

Name

In terms of the name I had a few ideas. I tired to incorporate “Ukulele” and “Tuner” in the app’s name. I was thinking of using words and letters such as: Ukulele, Uke, U, Tuner, Tune and T. After all I felt that U-tune is the easiest to spell and the quickest to remember.

Ideas

My research included competitive analysis of the ukulele apps already existing on the market and my own needs as a ukulele player. I figured that in an app like this one the most important are:

Tuner
Chords
Metronome

I decided to skip the onboarding and any extra screens. After all, the app is straight-forward and self-explanatory.

Tuner

The most important part of the app is the tuner. It opens with the standard tuning but there is also an option to change it for a less used tuning types.

It shows you the tuning notes per each string, which string is being tuned and when it’s in tune it turns green.

Metronome

I don’t use the metronome myself, but it might be something very useful for a ukulele player. Once again you can change the metronome settings. I imagine that as you turn on the metronome the outside green circle moves along with the tempo you set it up for (here the tempo is 4/4 so the circle s divided into 4 parts).

Chords

The last screen I created was the chords page. Every player from beginner to advanced loves to learn chords and/or get inspired by them. The chord names are distributed in a way to resemble piano keys and the information in the right top corner explains how to see the fretboard, which fingers to use and the purpose of the arrows on the side (which is to see other variations of the same chord).

Final thoughts

This project was very simple, yet it had its challenges. I knew what I wanted to include in the app straight away (based on my research), the problem was to choose the right colours (I started with dark brown and orange) and figuring out how to present each page. I am very satisfied with the outcome and it would love to use this app (anyone wants to make it real?). Most importantly, I am happy I have worked with the dark mode, which was the reason I decided to create this app design in the first place.