Rapid Prototyping and Iterative Design
It's a Date
It's a Date
Online dating is flooded with mobile apps that focus on throwing potential matches into "Yes" and "No" bins. It is impersonal and prevents users from interacting with people they might have found real, romantic connections with given just a little bit more time.
Many of the popular dating apps attract people with decidedly unromantic intentions. Shocking and uncomfortable bios and pick-up lines, blunt propositions, racy pictures...it is pretty clear when the other user has no skin in the game. Even when you find someone attractive and pleasant to talk to, there always remains the question: What is their end goal? Just a chat buddy or an actual romantic partner?
Introducing It's a Date. It's a Date encourages human connections through shared experiences. We thoughtfully curate dates to make users excited not only for the person they are meeting, but also the overall experience they are agreeing to be a part of.
User Research and Idea Generation
Our staff was comprised entirely of people within our target demographic- young professionals [20-34] living in or near Washington D.C. We used big-name dating apps for years and felt like there was something missing. A majority of our ideas came directly as responses to our own qualms with existing apps. Our own social circles aided early ideation and user research, and made our eventual user testing sessions self-sustaining in terms of participant recruiting.
Development
Frontend: React Native with Expo and Styled Components. We loved using this stack for mobile apps because it gave us the ability to get started creating quickly and did not create guardrails for the design team. They were able to create the exact experience people were asking for without worrying about views not being technically feasible or taking an unrealistic amount of time. Styled components felt right at home in React Native, allowing us to compose complex themes with custom React components in perfect harmony.
Backend: Node, Express, Typescript, Firebase Cloud Firestore, and Google Cloud Platform. There is not a backend stack out there that allows you to create real-time applications faster. We created our messaging feature in one day! However, that speed came at the cost of in-depth domain expertise to the interworkings of Firebase and the Google Cloud Platform. The flexibility you take for granted in more traditional environments like scheduling, backups, integration testing, and other operations took a bit more effort to implement.
Dev ops: We created three environments: Development, Staging, and Production. Development served as a playground for new features and allowed our development team to try certain features on phones before letting our design and functional team touch it in staging. Once features from Staging were tested and verified, we could deploy from our continuous integration to production.
The Landing Page
With app development nearly complete and users asking about app, we created a landing page to generate hype around the product. The emails we captured were leveraged for user testing events and beta testing the app in its current state. With more feedback under our belt, we launched a blog and CMS for team members to write about cool events happening in the DC area.
Administrative Portal
Adhereing to our design principles, we launched without many features users take for granted in a dating app, like blocking functionality and a support portal. Instead, we opted to create a personal concierge that would route messages directly to the team to take care of any issue. Not only did it align with our app's goal of being more personal to our audience, but it allowed us to cut the development runway by three weeks.
The admin portal was the place for our team to chat directly with users of the app, create new dates, and send push notifications. This was 100% integrated into the application and gave us fine grained control over how we interacted with users.
Design Thinking
For an internal app venture, this was our first experience tackling a domain as intimate as online dating and wanted to get it right. We enlisted the help of the SIDO Innovation team to help us run design thinking and facilitation sessions with friends and beta users. Through their proven techniques, we were able to pull out crucial insights on what users wanted and to see if we were on the mark with our hypothesis - something has to change in online dating.
Each session lasted roughly three hours with drinks and apps provided. What was most striking is how quickly people opened up about their frustrations with using the app and shared their experiences with the team.
Testing
For all apps, we implement three levels of testing:
- Programmatic testing: This involved taking the business rules established and writing tests in the code to make sure there were no errors. Errors like users getting matched up to the wrong gender or someone's message going to the wrong recipient. This made it crucial to make sure things worked as expected, especially on the backend. On top of tests writing for the logic of the application, we wrote the entire backend in Typescript to help us harden the code against any potential defects.
- UI Testing: All of the team members assisted in running through the app and scanning for potential defects in our Staging environment before deploying new code to Production.
- Focus Group Testing: Immediately after launch, we offered It's a Date to a user testing group of 20 participants. Users were instructed to move through the main event flow with specific aid only offered when requested. Points of approval, disapproval, and suggestion were all noted by category, then ranked by their urgency for continued development.
Launch
After flow improvements and other design tweaks were implemented, It's a Date was ready for submission to incubators, accelerators, and other funding sources.
Branding became a core focus as the specific voice of It's a Date began to emerge across press materials and internal app copy. Writing shifted from a single copywriter’s perspective to include internal insights from developers and other technical staff.
Our launched video amassed over 2,000 views in two days with an average engagement rate of 40% (industry average was 2%). Social ambassadors were recruited through our user testing sessions, which aided us in our initial user base growth. Brand ambassadors naturally fell in our target demographic due to our testing session selection parameters.