During the fourth year in UXID (User Experience and Interaction Design major at Drexel), we have junior project which runs for six months. Once teams were assembled, we confirmed the application idea and dove into creating a Gantt chart and kanban board on Jira to outline and assign all tasks for the project.

Some goals we have for the features of this app include:

There were five members on our team (project manager, UI designer, UX designer, content manager, and developer), and my role on this team has been UX designer and researcher. It has been important for me to look ahead in our process and understand what research we need to complete that will best help us in our design process, and this has been facilitated by our team meetings so that we are all on the same page.

Something I’ve learned while assuming this role is the importance in seeing the bigger picture, understanding the user’s needs and wants on a deeper level, and making sure that everything is cohesive, consistent, and easily digestible.

Below is our project canvas which I arranged based on notes we’ve made together as a team. This was a great exercise as all of our most valuable points – including our goals, risks, and success criteria – were all on one page. Some key takeaways from this is that the benefit of using Facets is the inclusion of friends to contribute to the user profile, the experience of meeting a match is more intentional and slowed down, and that it was impertinent that we flesh out the process for viewing different profiles.

Next, I arranged data to keep in mind when addressing our target audience. For Facets, we are designing primarily for audiences who are 18-36 years old, live in the United States in urban or suburban areas, are interested to get to know a potential partner, and are comfortable with inviting their friends to the app to help them with the matchmaking process.

The way that I approached the process of identifying our audience is to create criteria for our target audience based on initial surveys, then creating three different user personas who have different backgrounds and preferences, and then revisiting the general target audience criteria afterwards. The following are the three sample users that I established.

First there's Laura, a college student who is looking for a more genuine, slower-paced relationship. She’s someone who is more skeptical of people she meets online and internet safety and privacy is very important to her.

Next, there’s David. David is a 24 year old entrepreneur who is very involved in his worklife and is more introverted. He finds it difficult to put himself out there on the dating scene, and it would be very helpful for him to have his friends help out with the matchmaking process. He’s looking for a long term relationship and a meaningful companion in his life.

Finally, there’s Logan – a self-employed ceramicist who is looking to expand their social circle and find a relationship. Since they are self-employed, they tend to stay in their own area of the city and it becomes difficult to meet new people and to find a potential match. Unlike David, Logan enjoys a more relaxed lifestyle and works at their own pace, so finding someone who matches their energy is very important to them.

To further understand the users from the user persona, I had to step into their shoes. A great way to approach this was to create empathy maps. I created empathy maps for Laura and David, which include what they hear, say, do, see, think and feel, what they gain, as well as their pain points. These maps also helped to solidify a strong idea of who our target audience is.

As our process furthered, we conducted more research to gain more understanding of the scope of our project. This includes a competitor analysis (on competitors like Tinder, Hinge, and Blindmate), the information architecture, and a SWOT analysis.

As the UX researcher and designer, I wanted to ensure that we attained as much helpful information about dating apps as possible so we could deliver a product that was more in tune with human wants and needs. I did this by reading through published articles that covered different topics on the psychology behind dating and dating apps – this exercise yielded a lot of valuable findings that definitely helped us make UX decisions more affirmatively.

Some of the key takeaways are that dating apps help expand social circles, the language used in the app affects the experience (and all the top dating apps are broad-language based), and mobile vs desktop experiences activate different ways of thinking.

As a five member team, we wore many hats for researching, designing, and developing a web application in the span of 6-7 months. We’ve had to consistently meet every week to unravel any tangled yarns of ideas and to make sure we were weaving clean patterns.

Through many design iterations, development sprints, and branding meetings, we were able to effectively present a functioning product and were satisfied with the end results. It’s been a very fun learning experience being a part of this team and designing an app together. This experience in particular stresses the importance of efficient project management, clear communication between team members, self-discipline when it comes to adhering to deadlines and delivering quality work, and how important your role is in the grand scheme of the project.