Story
Genuine Connections, No Paywalls: Redesigning a Dating App for Real Human Interaction
Role: Lead UX Researcher & Designer
Timeline: April 2024 - June 2024
Platform: Figma
Context
Just like burnout with online dating, it also leads to superficial connections. Users are frustrated because many of these apps (ironically) value paid features more than meaningful interactions. We wanted to make a dating app that doesn’t have paywalls, but that actually encourages authenticity, accountability, and real connections. And that meant to build features that made the dating experience smoother, more enjoyable and built around real life interactions.
Challenge
The net of most online dating platforms is to maximize matches in place of realizing meaningful relationship. Unfortunately, this focus usually leads to users having inauthentic experiences and emotional burnout. To be able to resolve these pain points, we needed to build a dating app that promotes authenticity and provides a natural, emotional rush of bringing two people together.
Key Challenges:
Shallow connections brought out by over emphasis on looks.
Key features behind paywalls.
But there’s a demand for real-time interaction, and for authentic profiles.
Role
As a Lead UX Researcher, I would spend most of my time trying to dive deep into user needs and behaviors. This meant that I had to find a way to conduct background researches, design surveys, and run semi–structured interviews so I can have the results to be both qualitative and quantitative. Overall this data helped me identify key pain points and shape our design approach. I also worked alongside the design team to make sure our insights ended up in the app's features, and hopefully helped make an app that'd be emotionally rewarding for our users and feel authentic.
Research Insights
We used a number of the most important studies out there on the psychology of online dating and emotional well being. I synthesized insights from five key sources to guide our design decisions:
My Anxiety is the Result of Superficial Interactions
Insight: Users were anxious as the traditional dating app based on swiping did not go deep enough.
Design Impact: Our goal was to move the focus away from swiping and toward real interactions by use of event based matching and live video dates.
Appearance‐centered interactions cause emotional stress.
Insight: In a heightened anxiety and dissatisfaction towards their physical appearance.
Design Impact: We fought to combat this by including features like voice prompts and visual story profiles that focus on personality over looks.
User Behavior is Driven by Trust And Sensation Seeking.
Insight: Overall satisfaction of dating apps is dependable on the users undertaken to seek trust and excitement from these apps.
Design Impact: One of our features was built around creating trust through live interactions — real time chats, video calls — that made you feel more comfortable with your connections.
User Satisfaction Improves when the platform is personalized.
Insight: Personalized algorithmic suggestions can achieve better user experience.
Design Impact: We also introduced personalized event based matching and a skill exchange feature encouraging more meaningful relationships beyond tangible attraction.
Data Collection & Findings
Qualitative Interviews: In order to gain insight from a variety of users that have used these dating apps, I conducted semi structured interviews with diverse participants. Through these interviews, we gained a great deal of insight into how frustrating users find superficial connections and their need for tools which provide practical utility in real world interactions.
Quantitative Surveys: To validate the insights that came from interviews, I collected data from users using Google Forms. For example, 85 percent of participants were interested in event based matching and 78 percent were looking for features as a date planning assistant.
Promoting Authenticity
Visual Story Profiles
We emulate the kind of “story” feature like in Instagram or Snapchat to make profiles seem more personal and authentic. Such short videos and images would be shared by users and would signify their real lives and their interests.
User Insight: “Seeing someone’s daily life through their stories helps me get a sense of who they really are.”
Voice Prompts
Additionally we gave users the option to record short audio clips of themselves or answering questions. This brought a little bit more humanity to it and it didn’t feel as much like just a place to find guys based on their looks.
User Insight: “Hearing someone’s voice makes the experience feel more personal and less focused on how they look.”
Importance of Authenticity
Design Solutions
Real-Time Event Matching
We created a feature that creates matches for you based on there being interest in a real world event. This feature fostered more meaningful connections by allowing in person meetings to happen in a controlled environment.
User Insight: “I love the idea of meeting people at events rather than just swiping endlessly.”
Live Video Dates
This feature allowed people to know each other, before actually meeting, which helped build confidence and decreased the chance of awkward first dates.
User Insight: “It’s reassuring to see and talk to someone on video before committing to meeting in person.”
Instant Messaging
To continue momentum, we added an instant messaging feature that actually allowed users to continue conversations in real time keeping them alive.
User Insight: “Being able to message quickly keeps the excitement going, making the process feel more genuine.”
Real-Time Event Matching
Adding Practical Features
Date Planning Assistant
With this tool, users were able to plan dates directly in the app: suggesting venues and making reservations, all to reduce the friction of date logistics.
User Insight: “Having date ideas and making reservations within the app takes the stress out of planning.”
Skill Exchange Dates
Along the way, we introduced a feature where users could offer to teach or learn new skills on dates, to deepen connections through shared experiences.
User Insight: “It’s refreshing to have a reason to meet someone beyond just attraction — learning a skill makes the interaction more meaningful.”
Value of Practical Features
Future Research
Emotional Impact Study:
Moving forward, I will also investigate how these features affect users emotionally in topics like cultivating actual relationships and lasting happiness for users.
Long-Term User Engagement:
The next area of research is how to keep users coming back to the app on a long term basis and how features such as skill exchange dates and the date planning assistant can contribute to retention.
Conclusion
This project reiterated the need to design for authenticity and emotional well being in online dating. By concentrating on intrigue generating characteristics while improving the whole dating system and process we developed a website that meets users’ demand of confidence, fascination and genuine nature.
Reflection: In my research I bring forward the importance of taking a user center approach to deal with emotional challenges in online dating. I will continue moving forward on refining these features and exploring new possible avenues for building emotionally rewarding digital experiences.