Blush
End-to-end dating app for the stressed and single
Role// UX/UI Design
Year// 2024
Background
I started this project after learning of the current struggle young singles faces in online dating. I knew the process was stressful and disheartening on many levels, so I set out to discover why and to see how this might be best combated.
Goals
Creating an end-to-end mobile app to help online daters make more genuine matches and avoid people being dishonest with their intentions.
Problem
There are dozens of dating apps on the market, each full of people being dishonest about their interests and intentions, the same mechanics with their own little gimmick to set them slightly apart, and the half hearted guarantee that you’ll find a match without needing to pay. And after dealing with all this, there’s no guarantee the connections they make will be worthwhile. It’s no wonder that single people report feeling overwhelmed by online dating, often giving up entirely for months at a time, or feeling the need to pay for subscriptions to see results.
Impact
For this project I confirmed the need for such a project through research and user testing to create this product as a solo designer.
Research
Before I let my mind run away with any ideas, I had to start out by doing the research to inform future decisions.
Goals
The points that I sought to clarify in my research:
What aspects of the dating app experience people did like
Understand what it was that drove people to quit using dating apps
Get a clearer idea of how many people needed to pay for features
Discover what alternative methods people were using to date
Secondary Research
Tinder
Tinder is a dating app primarily for casual dates and hook ups amongst young adults
They have a good income from paid subscribers and paid add ons for people looking for more upgrades.
They don't have a good reputation for creating more serious or long term relationships, it's know as being a hook up app.
Hinge
Hinge is a dating app designed around making long term connections and meaningful connections.
They have a more advanced algorithm than other apps to help create better matches and you can see who has already liked you.
They're loosing money on the users who delete the app before ever paying for anything because they're too frustrated.
Bumble
Bumble is a dating app primarily for long term relationships.
They're known for being more "feminist" than other dating apps.
They don't do a great job staying unique other than their women message first feature, UI is nearly identical to other apps.
Findings
Initially, it seems as though most apps that exist on the market right now are suffering from over monetization and a lack of distinguishability from their competitors. Each app will have it’s own gimmick or mildly different styling, but at the end of the day they’re nearly identical.
Primary Research
To start I conducted five interviews over video calls with people from my target audience:
Ages 20-35
Has used a dating app
Methods
The methods that I would use to answer these questions:
Secondary research through analysis of competitive and pre-existing businesses in the same market
Primary research by way of in depths interviews and surveys across a larger audience
From these, I found the following series of reoccurring issues:
Most apps are useless unless you pay for features
Keeping up with small talk is overwhelming
Many reported that it was fun to swipe for their friends or that they’d let their friends swipe for them
Synopsis
After my interviews, a lot of what I found in my initial research was confirmed. All of my participants were either actively using several dating apps at once, had when they were single, or had before they got overwhelmed and deleted them all. All participants reported hating the small talk experience, being exhausted by the repeated swiping, and behind disheartened by people not accurately representing themselves.
One of the big things that stuck out to me was accurate representation. It’s all too easy to lie about things like height, relationship intentions, and other potential deciding factors. This is what got me thinking, is there a way I can eliminate that dishonesty?
Define
The first step within the define process was to take all of my findings and boil them down into two essential statements: A ‘point of view’ statement and a ‘how might we’ statement.
POV Statement
I’d like to discover ways to help online daters make more genuine matches and avoid people being dishonest with their intentions.
Next I needed to define my user a little bit better so that during my design process I had someone I could look at and ask myself, “Would this person use my product?“
User Personas
After compiling all of the information that I had gathered from my research, interviews, and survey I created two user personas to reference during my ideation to stay on track.
User Flow
Next on the docket was user flows, the task of mapping out all of the possibilities for different tasks a user might person on the website from start to finish.
User Flow: Account creation
Meet Emily, the girl with unrealistic standards.
Emily is a young real estate agent living in Seattle, WA.
She’s tired of going on dates with toxic men, but her rigid aesthetic requirements are eliminating a lot of options.
She wishes it was easier to know what peoples real intentions were on dating apps.
Meet Steven, a man with low self confidence.
Steven is a young adult working as an engineer while living in San Francisco, CA.
He’s never been very good at making dating app profiles for himself, he’s not sure what’s good to include.
He feels like this often leads to him being overlooked by the people he’s interested in and wishes he had somebody to help him out.
Now that I knew who I was designing for and what general problem I was trying to solve, it was time to think of some solutions.
Brainstorming
Through out the process up to this point, I’d had an idea in the back of my head that was getting more fleshed out with each step. The idea of friends making and controlling a dating app on their friends behalf seemed like an excellent solution. This would help in countering personal bias, the desire to exaggerate or lie on your profile, and greatly reduce the amount of pointless small talk.
Ideate
Now that know who I’m making this for and what it will be, it’s time to get into the details! What will this website consist of? What tasks will be performed?
Feature Set
Now that I had an idea in mind, I would need to figure out what features would be included in my app and organize them based on value and effort.
High Value
Account creation
About me section
Relationship goals
Matching system
System settings
Low Effort
Match chat
AI matching
Buddy profile
High Effort
Sticker achievements
In app events
Voice notes
Low Value
Design
Now that I’d narrowed down what features I wanted the app to include, it was time for the first phase of deisgns.
Sketches
I began with rough sketches of what I had in mind. To get the process started I downloaded several different dating apps to see what their set up process looked like.
With this information, I made a few different renditions of the account creation process. First I made a design using less screen but with more information on each, but after reviews I opted for more screens with less information per screen.
This resulted in an easier to follow process and a cleaner overall look.
UI Kit
With general page designs drafted up, the next step was design elements. I’d created a mood board of fun bright colors, trying to exude that desire to make dating apps more fun, and pulled this feeling into my UI kit.
I kept my color scheme bright and fun, making sure to run it through various color blindness filters to make sure it was all still legible. I wanted my color selections to feel welcoming to the user, letting them know they they’re in for a positive experience.
I kept the same mindset in the rest of my choices, trying to encompass that feeling of fun and positivity while maintaining legibility and inclusiveness.
Hi-Fi Prototype
With my UI kit done, logo created, and designs planned out it was time for my hi-fi design and prototype. I continued to build my prototype as I designed so that I always had a good understanding of how screens flowed together and different buttons would interact with each other. While not necessary to have a full prototype for my next round of testing, I wanted to give the most hands on experience to my testers that I could.
Test
Now that I had a working prototype, it was time to make sure that the design made sense not only in my own head. It’s all well and good for it to look nice, but does it work? Better yet, is it something people would actually use?
User Testing
For my user testing I gathered together five different users to test my main flow that I’d structured my prototype for, account creation. It was important to me to have a working prototype for this phase rather than just my high fidelity screens, as I find details can be easily missed when simple scrolling screen by screen.
Methodology
In person moderated usability testing
Remote moderated usability testing
Tasks
Account creation and viewing the tutorial
Success Metrics
Task Success
Task Completion
Time
User Confidence
Error Rate
Task Difficulty
Feedback
Overall users enjoyed the concept and visual design of the app, stating that it felt welcoming and seemed fun to use. While following a formatting that they were familiar with but using a more colorful styling, they were able to follow along with the task easily but felt it was more enjoyable. This positive reaction also seems due to the fact that most were eager to use this for their friends, and so did not experience the stress of creating an account for themselves.
However, it does seem that a few pieces of account creation information were skipped over in the design, the most prominent being height and age preferences. There were also questions about viewing the photos and information presumably uploaded by their single friend, which will be addressed in updates.
Iteration
No first draft is perfect, so armed with the information from my testing I went about the editing process.
Editing
In the creation of a dating app profile, there are a lot of different questions that need to be answered by the user, and I forgot one or two along the way! Thanks to my testing users, I was reminded what screens I had missed and was able to quickly whip up a few more screens.
A screen to choose age preferences for your friend
How you view photos your friend has uploaded
A screen to let us know how tall they are
In addition to this I made some minor color changes to make everything more legible. I changed inactive buttons from being outlined in yellow to the navy I was using everywhere else for text, I altered clickable text bubbled to a blue that stands out more, and got rid of a few instances of transparency. Overall, these changes were all with accessibility and legibility in mind, making sure that nothing blended in too much and was easy to understand.
Conclusion
Working on this project was a great experience in how to create a app from end to end on a short timeline. This took all the skills that I’ve been practicing up to this point and put them under an extreme time crunch, forcing me to be even more responsible with my time and scheduling. It was a fantastic experience, and I’m excited to see where these skills take me next.