A Dating App that Promotes Proactiveness
Background
From several pain points or "bugs" that we experience in our daily lives, our group decided to focus on promoting people's proactiveness on dating apps.
With over 44 million online dating users, online dating has become the go-to when young adults want to meet someone. However, because of so many personas one have to go through, it is hard to genuinely get to know someone. For example, conversations get started but suddenly gets dropped out of nowhere. Only about 33% of people report having a successful relationship when using dating apps.
“How might we help people be more proactive on dating apps?"
Preliminary User Research
1:1 Interviews
We conducted 7 user interviews to learn more about people's experience on dating apps and their expectations.
Targeted Survey
We made google survey and collected data from dating app users. This quantitative method allowed us to reach a larger survey group and receive numerous responses.
From survey with 19 respondents:
63% like the chatting option in combination with reading/creating bios
1 replied with a level 5 proactiveness (ranging from 1 to 5)
1 out of 5 reports being the first person who starts conversations
Secondary Research
We conducted further research based on already existing data and articles to gain a deeper understanding of user sentiments.
From our secondary research, we found that:
1. Relationships: Only a small share (33%) of Americans say they have been in a committed relationship with or married someone they met through a dating site or app.
2. Frustrations: Their recent experience left them feeling more frustrated (45%) than hopeful (28%). 25% say it left them feeling more insecure.
3. Needs: 72% of women say it was very important to them that the profiles they looked at included the type of relationship the person was looking for.
4. Messages: Six-in-ten men who have online dated in the past five years (57%) say they feel as if they did not get enough messages. Women are five times as likely as men to think they were sent too many messages
5. Troubles: (57%) sent women a sexually explicit message or image they didn’t ask for. 44% report that someone called them an offense name.
Insights from Preliminary User Research
1. People want to maximize their time utilization
2. People are more interested in more genuine responses
3. Musics and prompts are excellent features for people to learn about others
4. Humor and creativeness are essential parts of conversations
5. People have different opinions on how they communicate on dating apps
6. Some users can tell what kind of media others consume
7. First conversation is important for people to know if they want to progress
8. After a person shows interest, conversation is less meaningful
9. People have different purposes using a dating app
10. New features that allows people to demonstrate interests
10. New features that allows people to demonstrate interests
User Personas, Journey Map, and Storyboard
Based on the information we gathered, we created personas, journey map, and storyboard to assist our future ideation and prototyping.
Ideation
At this point, I carried this project on as an individual project. I brainstormed ten potential solutions based on our user research and insights to address our problem:
1. Add a ‘timer’ in the chatting feature that allows an amount of time to reply so that if the other person is really interested in you, they would utilize the time and start a conversation with you.
2. Include the musics and prompts feature when people create their profiles. These are excellent features for people to learn about the other person’s interests, music tastes, or backgrounds.
3. Create a series of questions for people to answer and they can select their visibilities to others. This makes the filtering easier since people can pass the ones with different purposes from them or have different opinions on the issues that are important to them.
4. When matched, provides a short guide for each person on how to start the conversation. This could be a guide with the other person’s highlights on profiles or answers to a question. This makes it easier to generate more genuine responses and to start a conversation.
5. Connect social media accounts to profile. Since there’s limited space in profile page, attaching social media accounts makes it easier for others to see the person’s more personal life and if they have similar interest in TikTok videos for example.
6. After some conversations, be able to rate your experience. If the overall experience for the two people are above certain score or level the conversation continues otherwise they unmatch. This is another way of maximizing people’s time utilization.
7. When matching, add features to demonstrate interest, such as sending flowers. Perception of interest is very important to people.
8. A feature that allows people to display their availability or status, like busy with school or busy with work. Since we found that availability corresponds with people’s willingness to respond.
9. Allow users to personalize their profiles more, like choosing their background color and add stickers. This is also a way to create more interesting profiles like when adding music or voice prompts.
10. Add a game section that allows the two matched people to play games together. Or add a "game night" event that allows everyone to play games together on a particular day. They can review each other's profiles and decide if they would like to match them afterwards.
I narrowed down the list and decided to continue my design with two of the ideas: Adding a timer and displaying availability or status. I also added rating the experience to my design, but it is not the most essential idea that I want to focus on.
Low-Fidelity Prototyping
I sketched some basic flows of the functions on iPad.
Timer Function
Status Function
Mid-Fidelity Prototyping
I used Figma to for my mid-fidelity prototyping, which displays the designs in a more realistic and aesthetic way.
Timer Function
Status Function
Insights from Usability Testing
After doing usability testing with some people, I received some feedbacks. Among all the feedbacks, I find the following most helpful for me to improve in my high-fidelity prototype:
1. Include a chat box;
2. More hint on click-ability;
3. Make the timer more customized;
4. More selections on status details;
5. Include a "back" button that navigates to previous page
High-Fidelity Prototyping
Introducing newly designed functions on a dating app that help people be more proactive. In the chatting feature, you can find a customized timer that allows a certain amount of time for the other person to respond; a rating function that allows better recommending algorithm; and a status function that allows you to know the other person's availability. With these features, you can maximize your time utilization and be more aware of the other person's availability.
Thanks for reading!
