What is the most important feature in the other person when you are seeking love? Good personality? Intelligence? High income? Or just good looks?
Almost all the popular dating apps on the market are trying to make users' photos stand out the most. Tinder, Coffee Meets Bagel, Zoosk are some famous examples that come to mind.
But... should good looks be the paramount reason for true love? Is there any possibilities that people "slide away" from their true love just because the other person has an ugly picture on her/his profile?
Get A Head is an app that we built to help single people find their loves. Instead of letting looks play an important role, we decided to cover user profile pictures with a "mask" from the beginning, and gradually fade out the mask as users engage in more interactions with one another. In this way, we encourage our users to truly get to know each other, so that looks alone do not decide their fate (and potentially the fate of their true love).
1. Product strategy contributor: Work with engineer team to contribute to product strategies.
2. User Researcher: Conduct research on potential users and define product goals.
2. UX/Product designer: Design smooth user flow, deliver enjoyable and fun user experience, and build usable and delightful user interfaces.
This is a map showing where the single people live in the U.S. On the west coast, especially the south Bay Area, the number of single men surpasses that of single women. On the other hand, there are more single women than single men living on the east coat.
How do people meet their significant others? Maybe the data can tell us an answer. The most common way is "through friends in common", the second is "out in a social setting", the third is "through work" and the fourth is "Online dating website or app", which is 9.4%. And the fifth is "Social media", which is 5.8%.
It seems that only less than 10% of singles use traditional dating apps. But we also see that people often meet their loves in events where they can engage in inter-personal communication. So we decided to encourage our users to chat without the influence of first appearance, and let their personality show their true selves.
In the current market, there are two types of similar products. One is the "serious dating" type, which is designed for people seeking serious relationships. Users on these sites usually need to fill in tons of information to build a complete profile of themselves.
The other is the "casual dating" type, which include apps like Tinder. This type of apps requires a limited amount of information from the users, because its primary goal is to help users find and get dates quickly, in which case looks play a more important role.
From the data below, we can see how different types of apps appeal to different users.
By synthesizing the data above, we get basic result about who are our potential users. Where are they, and how they perfer to meet people. Then I utilize the data results to build persona and user journey.
Mike is a software engineer who lives in San Jose. He is sharing a 3B3B apartment with two roommates. They play video games together every Friday night, but recently one of them found a new girlfriend and now have other plans for Friday night.
Mike loves coding and new technology. He always goes to the coffee shop down the street and enjoys his own time coding cool stuff. He also loves to play board games with his friends and have Chinese food together.
Tina is a designer who works at a startup in San Francisco. She works hard and has good relationships with her collegues. Tina goes to lunch meeting with her team twice per month, and they have D&D game night every Thursday. She loves to play the Werewolf game with her friends and have asian food together. She also enjoys her movie night by herself on Friday night. She sometimes practices yoga or joins hiking meetups on weekends.
Here I took characters from BoJack Horseman as a demonstration of what the mask might look like.
Bulk simple wireframes quickly based on hero flows can help us find problems quickly. It can also help us to define look and feel of the product in early stage. I use Principle to make quick prototypes to do quick user testings. Through this way, we find and solved many problems.
Because dating apps always make people feel purposeful and sometimes embarrassing, it's very important to encourage users to interactive with others actively. By adopting game-like design, suddenly a challenging information exam becomes edutainment.
It's a simple fact that people love games. Games intrigue human beings, and that is why we invented myriad kinds of games: Go, chess, video games, board games, and all kinds of sports.
When people are exploring strangers on a dating app, the thing they can do is either seeking for good looking people, or do background study about other users and choose "the right one". Just imagine boring these apps are to HR people - there's no really difference between their daily job and dating. Borning, right?
Get-A-Head is trying to help people meet others through a fun and mysterious process. The way to unlock achievements is to engage with people, and the process of removing masks becomes the inventive prizes in this "game".
Also, Get-A-Head introduces fun ways to help users meet offline. Such as exploring people nearby or joining a meetup and doing things together.
Our team is working on the basic backend structures, and trying to launch it as soon as possible to get our very first adopters. We will terget young Chinese people who are living in the Bay Area first. Once we get the very first seed users, we will measure the data, and improve the app based on data analysis. And most importantly, our ultimate objective is to help users find THE ONE in their lives.
