The Industry Dating Project
Whether you’re in a dating mood or you’re just moody, we‘ll find matches for you
The Hurdle:
The Mood dating app aims to deliver an experience where users can be more specific with what they’re looking for by choosing a mood. Whether their mood is romantic, platonic, casual, long-term, or something more specific like diving into kinks, this app aims to put users in those same categories so they can skip the messy dialogue to reach that conclusion with one another. The team working on the Mood dating app had all been comprised of men and they worry that their design will not cater enough to their female audience.
The Resolution:
The goal for the industry design group, consisting of 4 women in a group of 5, would be to bring a fresh perspective to the Mood dating app and introduce redesigns that come with a woman’s touch. At the end of our Springboard journeys as hopeful UX designers now, we were more than ready to take on the 4 week design challenge.
The Research:
Week 1 consisted of mostly of us speaking with the startup CEO and one of his lead engineers of what this project would look like and for them to lay down some of our expectations for how things will go. Like clockwork though, the beginning stages of every project will always be research, and researching how to design an app is to study what competitors are already excelling or failing at. The most important things to look out for when researching competitors is finding out the user demographics’ needs.
Defining User Needs:
Users that would choose to use a dating app are users who crave ease and accessibility without confusing clutter
App needs to be easy to use but still a lot of fun in order to keep engagements and user retention high
Large portion of userbase will likely have some experience with other dating apps but will need more support in figuring out apps with more features.
We had key features we needed to assemble for development so every design choice from research to completion will be based off of what development needs.
Design Process:
Creating a Mood Board:
Since different team members were delegated to different tasks. Week 2 my main research in delved into finding existing elements and features from other apps and creating a mood board to give us a sense of direction with our eventual design choices.
Alpha Prototype:
Week 3 consisted of me working on the screens delegated to me which was to work on offer messages, icebreaker requests, their counterparts, and inbox/messages. These were my first iterations of them.
High Fidelity:
Week 4 had us going through feedback from the startup’s CEO and with each other on how we could consolidate our assets to better match each other’s schemes. Since many of my screens overlapped with another teammate’s we decided to collaborate more on how we could get our screens to best match the overall design scheme.
Debrief:
Since there is no real user testing involved in the 4 week design period, after we consolidated all our different screens into one prototype to present to the startup’s CEO. Since we were in contact with him every week as we were going through our designs it was pretty easy to come up with something that would please him. Later on he would even email us all individually to tell us that his core team at the startup had decided to go with all the designs we had made for them.
Working in a much more real work setting where getting it right carries much more weight can feel a bit intimidating at times. With school work you can mess up and go back to work on it, or if you get sick and can’t perform enough to get a good grade you can potentially go back to redo things. While redoing things can still be done in more real work environments, everyday costs time and time in real work settings costs money, making everyday mean so much more.
Test The Mood Dating App Prototype Yourself!