I worked as a co-researcher and co-designer in this agile team. The purpose of this project is to practice problem-solving in the state-of-the-art sprint method. Every two weeks, we rinsed and repeated the process of researching, ideating, designing, testing, and refining a new product.

Duration: Mar - May (9 weeks)
Role: UX researcher and designer
Team: 2 Researchers; 4 designers; 1 Product manager; (2 Developers in November)
Skills: Survey; Interview; Figma; InVision; Trello
Result: High-fidelity prototype & Web app

The dating app space is a huge market as so many people are looking for love, intimacy, and companionship. The 21st-century solution is online dating through mobile app. Dating should be fun and healthy, but current online dating solutions can be frustrating and borderline toxic.

How could we make online dating better?

Our team dived into feature design at the beginning. But I believed that the dating market was highly saturated with some dominating apps. To find a point of penetration, I suggested that we dig deeper into the current dating app experience. 

Competitor Analysis

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 4 frequent users of Tinder. We also created a survey covering topics such as dating experience and perception of dating apps, and gained 24 responses. Upon analyzing the results, we decided to build a product for those who are looking for long-term relationships.

Product Vision

To establish meaningful connections and to humanize online interaction

To better utilize the two-week sprint, I created a Trello board to run this agile team by adding goals, prioritizing tasks, collating changes, and updating the backlog. 

One-match-per-day

Since we only provide one match every 24 hours, the quality of the match becomes extremely important

Here're the product features our team collectively thought of to solve the problems.

In this sprint, we spent a lot of time nailing the user flow of our app. Key takeaways include:

• Knowing where and when to have the onboarding questionnaire, and how to design the questions.

• Putting the sign-up page after the questionnaire and match to incentive users to sign up

Our team collaborated on the first digital prototype using Figma for testing. 

Findings

• Users enjoyed how fun and different it was

• Questions should be more skewed towards dating

• Add option to “skip”

Next Steps

• Answer: once users match with one another, how will they interact for the 24 hours they are paired?

• Answer: what if a user doesn't like their match?

What if I don’t like my match?

Well, why wouldn’t you like your match?

Instead of designing to answer "what if I don't like the match", we delved deeper into the root causes. Users admitted that physical appearance plays a vital role in the first impression, but becomes less important as they get to know each other.

We then introduced bitmoji profile to minimize “judging a book by its cover”. Ideally, this person would be a great match, so the chat/interaction would be pleasant anyway.

That being said, people would want to see the real photo at some point. We came up with the idea of unlocking photos and other features like games, music-sharing, etc., to gradually increase their intimacy. 

What we are testing: determining what people would want to do with their matches

Testing Process: we asked 5 participants to

• have a co-design session where we explain the product and ask for inputs

• provide feedbacks on two specific features: bitmoji and unlocking process

Findings

• Users would commit to their match for 24 hours as they’re looking for serious relationships

• Still, they’d like to pick up the pace

• “How am I compatible with my match?”

• Users had mixed feelings about bitmoji

• Users were excited about extended functions

Next Steps

• Add “question of the day” and chat board for those who opt-in to answer

• More informative bio to show why two people are matched

• Build in extended and gamification functions

• Refine and test bitmoji idea again in next sprint

• Ease the unlocking process

Build a dating experience

What else can we do to make online dating fun?

We redesigned the unlocking process. At the selected time, users would see their match-of-the-day with a bitmoji profile. From there, they could either interact with them to see the real photo or simply wait another 2 – 3 hours to automatically unlock the photo.

What we are testing: how users engage with their match

Testing Process: we asked 4 participants to

• go through the chat and game screens on InVision

• answer follow-up questions & exit interview

Next Steps

• Add a "report your match" system

• Create a high-fidelity prototype that includes all phases - tour, onboarding, match profile, chat screen, etc.

• Interaction design

Due to school schedule changes, our team didn’t have a final sprint to polish our design. Hence, I created a new set of high-fidelity screen design myself.

Cup of Tea has been the most novel design project I've worked on at UW. The biggest takeaway is that design is a living process. It’s constantly changing and iterating, for better or for worse. In our case, the three usability tests we ran with 15 people led to so many changes that make the product much better.

If there were more time, we would test the entire user flow where a user finds, matches, and interacts with another user. There are also more features we hope to incorporate, such as setting up a date and getting a second match.

Several months later, two friends at my UW program borrowed this project and turned it into a functional mobile app. Code on Github: Android version; iOS version. Video demo. Another student team also approached me to develop my design.