TAYLORSENSE APP

Challenge

Taylor Guitars is the leading manufacturer and brand of premium acoustic guitars in the United States. With an average price-point of $2,500, care and maintenance are extremely important to owners. Extreme humidity, temperature, and impacts are leading causes of serious damage and often require expensive repairs. 

Solution

My north star with any product development is “Be useful. Be helpful.” 

For the Taylorsense app we had the added challenge of a hardware component. The engineers developed a bluetooth module with sensors for humidity, temperature, impact, and battery charge connected to a data logger was designed and integrated into the standard 9-volt battery box. This gave us the data source we needed to monitor the guitar health.

We worked extensively with Taylor guitar repair techs to model the conditions that would trigger alerts while minimizing false positives and negatives. The last thing you want with an app like this is for it to be wrong or annoying.

The follow on use case to monitoring a guitar’s health is what to do if the guitar does get damaged. To solve for this we designed and developed a custom content module within the Drupal CMS system Taylor uses to power their website. This allowed us to develop a library of support videos, how to articles, and FAQ’s that we could simultaneously publish to both the website and the Taylorsense app via its API.

Role

  • Product owner responsible for project success
  • Concept, design, development, systems integrations
  • Team coordination, deliverables, timeline and budget management