EMPATHY

I began the process with research goals to discover how people approach searching for a perfect date and to understand what influences their decision on whether or not go on a date especially during a pandemic. I also sought to identify and analyze Safe Date competitors in order to gain a better understanding date app industry, and uncover gaps among the existing apps.

RESEARCH COMPONENTS
Market research
Competitor analysis
User surveys
User interviews

RESEARCH PLAN
The Research Plan was created in order to help define the target market and to discover their behaviors and views towards dating.

SECONDARY RESEARCH
First, I conducted secondary research to gain a better understanding of date apps, the target market, existing apps and the market space.

MARKET RESEARCH
I began my research by delving into learning about and understanding the current date app market and Safe Date’s target audience. Finding safe places for a date during COVID-19 and just coming out with ideas can be challenging.

• There are fewer places to meet new people

• Both in-person or through video chat, increased by 17% from August 2019 to August 2020 according to Hinge data.

• It’s harder for couples to have new experiences together or get physically intimate, which makes it harder to bond.

• “Messaging on Hinge increased 30%. Tinder saw its biggest day ever on March 29, with over 3 billion swipes, and on OKCupid, virtual dates shot up 700%, according to Business Insider”.

• Once a couple has had a series of successful virtual dates, where do they go from there? And how do they do it safely?

After market research, I looked into Safe Date’s competitors and browsed through threads written by avid readers and users of similar apps on places like Apple's App Store and Reddit. For qualitative data, I searched for social media, Reddit, and other places where the target audience would share their reviews and thoughts on book tracking apps.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Afterwards, I conducted a competitive analysis of iOS apps that shared the similar target audiences and provided similar services as Safe Date. I relied heavily on App Store reviews to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor. I primarily used SensorTower and Apple's App Store to read customer reviews of the competition. Based on my findings, I was also able to confirm that Yelp was the top competitor. I was also able to identify other competitors and related apps. I then looked into assessing each competitor based on the customer reviews and downloaded each of them on my phone to get a firsthand glance.

The strengths identified across the various platforms included:

• Search features

• Ratings and reviews

• Simple to use

Opportunities discovered based on my competitor analysis:

• Improve the UI

• Faster integration and identification of COVID safe places to go

• Smooth integration for log in and social media connection

PRIMARY RESEARCH
To better understand the pain points and goals of those who use dating apps and other parts of my research questions that the secondary research was unable to answer, I developed an interview script and conducted user interviews with participants over the zoom. I interviewed three people during my bootcamp and one person after the course.

DEFINE

EMPATHY AND PERSONA DEVELOPMENT
After going through my interview transcripts and identifying behavior and need patterns, research was synthesized into a set of deliverables that guide me in keeping the users as a priority in the design process.

In order to understand my key users better, I created two personas and an empathy map.
I created the personas, John and Claudia, using my research, namely that from the 1:1 interviews.
To further explore relationships and develop the persona that emerged from the data I’d gathered and mapped, I created an empathy map made up of observations and statements from my user interviews and diving deeper into John’s mindset. This helped me further understand the emotional state of the user.

POINT OF VIEW STATEMENTS AND HOW MIGHT WE QUESTIONS
Now that I had a better understanding of my users and really honed in on the specific pain points, it was time to focus on creating solutions. From my insights and needs, I rephrased these into a point of view (POV) statement and reframed each these as a “how might we?” (HMW) question, in order to start working towards solution-focused designs.

• How might we provide users a quick way to search COVID safe activities?

• How might we help users receive COVID safe dates recommendations?

• How might we provide users a quick way to save their COVID safe list of places?

I then used these HMW questions to begin brainstorming solutions. I did this by writing down each of the HMW questions, spending 2 minutes writing solutions for each, coming up with a feature roadmap and landed on several features that would solve the narration and concentration challenges:

IDEATE

APP MAP
I developed app map to solidify the organization of screens within the app.

USER FLOW
Using the sitemap, research findings and developed persona, I was then able to chart a user flow. The flow below shows several main paths for a user.

WIREFRAMES
I began to wireframe key pages informed by my task flows. I took to pen and paper to start with hand sketching. In these initial sketches, I was able to quickly brainstorm and come up with alternate ideas, building on each of them in order to move on to mid-fidelity sketching.

The first three screens are versions for home page, the next pages are profile versions, search and date details page.

After receiving feedback and implementing some changes to the wireframes, I moved on to the visual design phase. Some users mentioned that they would like to have a notification screen, which I was able to quickly add. Also, users mentioned that My Dates screen is too busy and they would like to see less content.

PROTOTYPE

MOCKUPS
I decided to use blue as my main color because blue gives a feeling of trust. It stands for communication and efficiency and that is what I want this app to deliver. It helps users to find safe dates during COVID-19 times. The user will trust the app to choose a great location for a perfect and safe date.

TEST

USABILITY TESTING (Overview & goals)
I tested the usability of the main user flow using the high-fidelity prototype. My main goals were to:

• Evaluate the overall usability of the app.

• Make note of any difficulties for further iteration/improvement

• Collect feedback from users on ease of navigating app

To test these designs, I tested the high-fidelity prototype on three users remotely using Figma. This method allowed me to get quick feedback users and some automated analysis of the results.

KEY FINDINGS
All the users sucesfully completed tasks viewing their current date, looking for new date ideas and checking out date details.