Reducing Friction So Things Get Done
Reducing Friction Is a Design Decision
A lot of the design decisions in My Music Studio come down to one thing: reducing friction so things actually get done. That matters from both sides. No teacher wants to spend their time chasing parents with follow-up emails, and no parent wants to learn a complicated new system just to find out what their child needs to practise.
Keeping Teaching Uninterrupted
A good example of this is lesson notes opening in a new tab. On the surface, it can seem like an extra step. But in practice, it allows two very different modes of work to sit alongside each other without getting in the way.
The lesson tab becomes the lesson world. You open it, teach the lesson, and everything you need for that student is right there. When the lesson is over, you close it. Alongside that, you have your main system tab, which is where any business or administrative tasks can happen without disrupting the flow of teaching.
The goal is that you don’t have to constantly navigate back and forth just to do something simple, like adding a student to a performance. Teaching stays uninterrupted, and admin stays contained.
Everything You Need for a Student, in One Place
Inside the lesson notes themselves, everything related to teaching that student is available in one place. Previous lesson notes are visible. Upcoming performances or exams are clearly shown. You can see their current programs. Attendance can be marked. Nothing essential to teaching that student is spread across multiple screens or hidden behind extra navigation.
Supporting Different Attendance Workflows
Attendance marking is another area where friction adds up quickly if the system forces a single workflow. Some teachers like to mark attendance directly from lesson notes while they’re teaching. Others don’t dive deeply into lesson notes at all and rely more on the dashboard and schedule view. Some prefer to review their list of lessons at the end of the day and mark everyone in one go.
All of those approaches are valid. Attendance can be marked from multiple places in the system to suit different working styles. The important thing is that the admin still gets done, without forcing teachers to work in a way that doesn’t fit how they actually teach.
Parent Access Without Admin Overhead
The same thinking applies to how parents interact with the system. In many systems, parents need to be manually invited to create an account. Those invitations expire, parents miss them, and teachers have to follow up with individual parents and students repeatedly, just to get them into a system.
In My Music Studio, once a parent’s email address is added, that parent is automatically eligible for an account. There is no separate invitation step. If and when they choose to sign up online, their account will automatically link them to any music schools they are associated with, whether that’s just one teacher or multiple schools for different children.
Removing Barriers to Parent Responses
Just as importantly, parents don’t have to create an account to respond to things you need from them. All actionable items, from consent forms, to RSVPs and performance recordings, are sent via tokenised email links. As long as someone has access to their email, they can respond. Creating an account is optional. It gives them more visibility into their child’s progress, but it is never a barrier to providing the information you need.
News works in a similar way. It exists as a standalone section, but it is also linked into performances. When a performance is created, relevant news items can be generated automatically using information that has already been entered. There’s no need to enter the same details twice just to keep parents informed.
Scheduling With the Right Information at the Right Time
Scheduling is another area where friction often hides in plain sight. Making good scheduling decisions requires seeing a lot of information at once: lessons, student availability, your own teaching hours, and other commitments. The scheduler brings all of that together in a single view, with the ability to toggle pieces on and off depending on what level of visibility you need. You see what matters for the decision you’re making, and nothing you don’t.
Bulk Scheduling Without Manual Cleanup
Bulk lesson scheduling is built into that same workflow. If a student changes days mid-term and their lessons have already been scheduled for the year, there’s no need to manually fix dozens of entries. You select the date range, choose “delete and replace”, and the system generates a new, correct set of lessons in under a minute.
Collecting Availability Without Email Chains
Collecting availability follows the same principle. Instead of sending messages to every family and managing a long chain of replies, parents enter their availability directly into the system. Teachers then work with a complete picture, rather than piecing together information across multiple conversations.
Small Decisions That Remove Daily Resistance
All of these decisions are small on their own. Taken together, they remove constant low-level resistance from everyday studio work. Teaching stays central and admin fits around it. The system does what it should: support the work, rather than adding to the burden.