The Idea

Quick Key was born from a conversation between entrepreneur Isaac van Wesep and his friend, teacher Walter Duncan. Duncan, a strong proponent of daily student quizzes, was frustrated with the time-consuming process of hand-grading or relying on expensive scanning machines. He envisioned a simple solution—what if his phone could quickly scan and grade answer sheets?

The more they discussed it, the more they realized the potential of this idea. Their goal was to create a tool affordable for all teachers, from low-income schools to affluent institutions. By making regular testing more accessible, they believed Quick Key could help bridge the educational divide between rich and poor.

“A lot of education technology is wonderful and useful, but only accessible to the 1 percent of students and teachers in well-funded schools,” explains van Wesep. Determined to change that, they set out to turn their vision into reality.

They partnered with Rocket Farm Studios to bring their concept to life, impressed by the team's quick RFP response, creative portfolio, and hands-on discovery process. Lacking a detailed technical plan, van Wesep and Duncan relied on Rocket Farm to translate their vision into a clear set of requirements and a simple, intuitive app experience.

Two major challenges stood in the way of their vision: developing a smartphone camera that could accurately scan answer sheets, and ensuring the app worked in both online and offline environments—crucial for teachers in rural and underconnected regions.

Our Strategic Approach

The challenge was to collaborate with 5 different companies to create an app, accounting for sheet music, digital rights, and a store.

While determining how to translate a sheet music store and playback to the iPad, we faced several engineering challenges.

The Notestar app integrated Yamaha’s eCommerce engine with Noteflight’s Publishing Server, as well as the Digital Rights Management servers for Hal Leonard and MusicSales.

Rocket Farm had to utilize the signal processing capabilities of the iPad to handle pitch correction and tempo changes on the iPad in real-time, so users could speed up or slow down playback to match their own speed.

Finally, there was the graphics processing — the display of music scores with advanced animation of page-turning, all tightly synchronized with the playback of one or more audio tracks.

Design

The Experience

UI Design

The first challenge was transforming a smartphone camera into an effective optical scanner. While taking a picture of a bubble sheet was easy, factors like lighting conditions, shadows, and the phone’s position complicated the process. As developer Seth Lipkin explains, “Lighting can cause empty bubbles to look darker than filled ones, depending on their location on the page.”

To overcome this, Rocket Farm developed a refined program that compared neighboring pixels to accurately detect whether a bubble was filled in. Lipkin created a library of test images that had caused errors, using them to fine-tune the program until it could handle any lighting condition or positioning with speed and accuracy.

“Once I had the test cases going, I knew that when we sent it out into the field, it would work. The result was an extremely accurate and fast scanning app,” Lipkin says.

The second major hurdle was ensuring the app could function offline. In remote and rural environments, teachers often have limited or no internet access. To meet this challenge, the app was designed to store data locally and sync with servers once an internet connection was available. This functionality allowed teachers to use the app anywhere, ensuring it could be adopted in a wide range of educational settings.

Rocket Farm provided a thoughtful and innovative process that got us through a lot of design challenges in a short time. Their work on NoteStar demonstrates the ability to create products that are smooth running, innovative, and well designed.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

Development

Making it work

Rocket Farm's engineers worked closely with van Wesep and Duncan to build an app that could seamlessly scan quizzes and sync data across both offline and online environments. The result was Quick Key Mobile, which launched just in time for the school year in September 2013. Since its launch, Quick Key has been a massive success, quickly gaining popularity among teachers worldwide.

“Quick Key has a big cult following,” says van Wesep. The app is now used in nearly 40 countries, including Egypt, China, South Africa, the UK, and Brazil. To date, over 270,000 quizzes have been scanned using the app.

As Quick Key continues to grow, van Wesep and Duncan plan to expand the app's functionality. Their next project includes developing a platform that will house a library of teacher-generated quiz questions. Teachers will be able to rate questions, helping others choose the best ones for their assessments.

The player portion of the app handled scaling note sizes, allowing for changes in pitch and playback speed. The app had to support page-turning by both the user and the app when in playback mode.

There were also other unique interaction challenges: setting loop points to practice a section repeatedly, adding annotations to the score, and selecting different pitches. With all these , Rocket Farm undertook separate design phases.

The first was focused on the eCommerce store and the other on the playback experience. We actively tested user interactions as they were implemented. This approach was critical as these were ground-breaking features that required more than great paper designs, but the iterative incorporation of real user feedback to get it right.

Rocket Farm Studios were extremely agile in how they presented and iterated on design – whether for the HTML5 store portion or the much more expressive set of interactions incorporated into the playback aspect of the app.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

Technology Used