I never found songwriting easy, as I was always in pursuit of the ultimate guitar riff. You know — the ones that cut straight to the chase, get your head nodding, and burrow deep into your brain, remaining there for days. I found the simplest, most awesome guitar riffs are also the most difficult to achieve.

And it’s the same thing with design.

Many digital products I experience are devoid of hooks — elements which distinguish them from the next experience or startup. They often use the same bootstrap systems or homogenous design aesthetics. Making a simple, more unique product experience is also a difficult thing to achieve.

But we can draw inspiration from the world of making awesome guitar riffs to rethink creating great brand experiences for digital products.

Before we’re ready to jam, let’s set the stage properly.

Genre
The type of product or industry you are designing for can be an influential factor when getting ready to start designing.

What may feel appropriate for a classical music streaming service for the over 65s probably won’t work for a virtual classroom experience for kids.

What feels appropriate for the genre you are designing for? Don’t feel like genre is a straitjacket that defines what you can or can’t design. Some of the best guitar riffs re-define genres, but you have to be willing to push the boundaries a little.

Equipment
Once you know the genre you are designing for, you can use this to inform your choice of equipment.

So for me in my pop-punk band days, my equipment was a Fender Stratocastor guitar paired with a JCM 900 Marshall stack amplifier. This was to get the distortion sound I felt matched the genre. I had a simple set-up — no chorus effects or delay pedals; clean and distortion channels were the sounds at my disposal.

For design: think about the right tools for this particular job — equipment that suits your genre and helps you to do the best work you can. To equip yourself for designing digital products, you’ll want to gather things like:

The equipment you choose doesn’t have to be set in stone just yet, but they should act as a starting point that you can refine once you start jamming.

Lyrics and Audience
I used to be take inspiration from our singers’ lyrics when we were writing songs. I’d read through them to understand the themes and tone of the narrative, then use them to try and evoke different feelings in our audience through chord progressions or choice of notes.

Applying this metaphor to design: you’ve got lyrics, which is the content you are using to design from (you should use real content whenever possible, not lorem ipsum — unless you are designing for a nonsensical latin startup). And you should also have a good idea of your audience, or in this instance your users too.

The stage is set and your equipment is plugged in ready to go. You’ve got your content, users in mind and your head is in the right genre. The time has come to jam.

Let’s breakdown what I feel makes an awesome guitar riff:

1. They begin a song
2. Get repeated throughout
3. Give a song its distinctiveness
4. The simpler, the better

Therefore, design riffs are simple repeatable elements in a product experience that hook the user from the get-go, giving a product its distinctiveness.

There are so many elements to play with to enhance your design riffs. But it’s about how you bring them together to make an overall effective design.

Speed and rhythm: This can come through in your use of white space, the hierarchy of information, text sizes or inventive grid usage and layout techniques. It might mean coming up with templates and formats that are easy to use and recognise for your users.

Moving through keys: Going from major to minor can shift the atmosphere of a riff entirely. How might you invoke that same feeling in a design riff?

Time signatures: Especially unexpected time signatures can be stand-out moments in guitar riffs; in design riffs these could be your high and low points. An intriguing wash of colour or selective usage of animation to attract attention or imbue meaning can be used to great effect.

Borrow from other genres: A tried and tested method in awesome guitar riffs is to build on ideas used in other genres. What other industry verticals or areas could you look to to inspire interesting hooks or elements for your design?

Signature interactions: Much like Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi developed a distinct hammering style (partly due to an industrial accident causing the loss of two finger tips). When wielded responsibly, a signature interaction can stamp your brand onto meaningful interactions a user has when using your product.

Style and timing of animations, distinct colour transitions or leaning on your brand’s tone of voice, are places to start for creating meaningful signature interactions or moments.

A note on animation
Animation can act as a fantastic hook to gain attention but it should be used with restraint. Much like a guitar riff can be over-used — animations, if repeated too much can cause fatigue, boredom or give a sense of sluggishness to an experience.

No-one wants their interface to feel like a 3 minute guitar solo.

Musical genres have their formulas and overly-familiar structures, much the same as we as designers have invented our own industry tropes.

Jon Gold’s “Which one of the two possible websites are you currently designing?” highlights an awkward truth in the digital design industry.
Have we become lazy?

And another recent observation from Tom Cavill — The emergent Stripecore genre

Digital product designers are living in a vacuum: using the same tools and copying each other without a second thought for context or appropriateness.

We should be taking a leaf out of The Kinks guitarist Dave Davies’ book and looking closer at the tools we use to design with.

To counter the mainstream, clean guitar sound of the 1960’s, Davies slashed the speaker cone of his guitar amp when it wasn’t creating the expressive tones he was searching for. In this act of anger, Davies changed the course of the guitar tone forever — introducing distortion to the aural palette.

Instead of conforming to the norm and allowing his tools to dictate his sound, he altered them to create an entirely new one.

Consider your choice of design tools and question if they are controlling the kind of styles you can fully explore. Defaulting to using Sketch might not be the right thing to do for every digital product you design (at least to begin with).

***

Next time you are starting the design of a new digital product or re-designing an existing one — consider your genre, equipment, content and audience. Take cues from the world of awesome guitar riffs to craft an experience that expertly uses speed & rhythm, key changes, time signatures or signature interactions. And use them to elevate what could become another boring product experience to one that sets itself apart from the crowd.

Illustrations by Sam Russell Walker.