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A group dating feature for a dating app focused on British and Irish Expats in Sydney, Australia
Project Role
UX Designer/ Researcher
Duration
August - September 2021, 4 weeks
Team
Mwiza Silozi, Andrew Sur, Valerie Moreno, Me
This was a client project completed with a team of 3 others.
Project Overview
Discover
Ideate
Prototype
Test
Competitor Analysis
Research Interview
User Personas
Wireframe
Sketching
Analysis
Wireframe
Sketching
Lofi/Hifi Prototype
Guerilla Testing
Final Prototype Test
Project Background
Swanned is a platform for British and Irish expats to connect with one another after leaving their homes for a new life overseas. The app matches users with one other profile based on geographical location. They are currently looking to integrate a group meeting feature to expand the number of users forming connections.
Design Requirements
Create a way to monetize the new feature
Problem
How might we create a tool for Expats to promote deeper conversation while encouraging in person meetups and create authentic connections?
Solution
User Generated Content increases engagement, allows for more personal and unique events that fit a users taste, and helps to create a community.
Create and join plans to explore your local community in groups!
Show some personality and tell your group story!
No swiping! Find genuine mates and dates through local group plans!
Competition
landscape
Besides a more user friendly user interface, we concluded that for group dating, we were looking for features that encouraged spontaneity and allow users to explore there community.
Target Users
We created these personas to help us visualize different scenarios our users go through. We would then use their pain points to explore possible opportunities.
Key Research Insight
Through our research, we believe interactive features that promote spontaneity and focus less on features that socialize through the phone and more on meeting in person for a dating app will help lead to a more engaged user base.
Userflow / Lofidelity
After creating our personas, we created a user flow to combine all user stories into one step-by-step process that would be clear to follow for our design process. We created mid-fidelity wireframes to organize content hierarchy for each screen. We also had a week to create our high-fidelity wireframes so we wanted to create a feasible product for our users to test and for our client to give us feedback.
Insights from Final Interview
Users reported that they experienced an information overload when creating group. The page was requesting too much information for the user to focus on one task.
To create an event, users had to upload a photo from their gallery and include the “Event” title, description, date, location, and time. There was no option to filter who could join the event.
Final HiFi Red Routes and Prototype
Create Plans
Create Group
Finding and Requesting to join event
Final Prototype
Link to my final Figma file here
Outcomes
This project came with a lot of difficulties such as different individual schedules and tight deadlines, but overall led to a solid project at the end. Our client was very pleased with our work for her app in the limited amount of time we had, and exceeded her expectations of not only creating a thought out and tested new feature but also creating a new possible visual direction for the app. I embraced the challenge of working with a group and with clear expectations and communication from each other, it greatly benefitted our project. Without competent teamwork, it would be very difficult to be able to create a solid feature in such a short amount of time.
Next Steps
If given more time, I would definitely implement a livetime map feature to this group dating mode. It would be able to not only show group dates through proximity, but also be a visual way to show the community.
Lessons Learned
A big thing I learned from this project was that although as a team we created some great ideas through indepth research and group ideation sessions, ultimately our client did not choose our main ideas we were pushing for the direction of her new feature. Although our client liked them, realistically at the time they were not implementable at the time with only one developer on the team and a very small budget. Often times you have to be realistic in the real world as a designer, and as much as the user is the most important aspect as a UX Designer, we are also trying to help businesses create instant results.
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