O1

A platform to rule them all.

Spark Networks priority as their portfolio grew was to understand how to develop and design a platform that will serve as the backbone of each niche application to be able to improve their products faster and in a more agile way.

O2

Research.

One way to simulate real-life situations when finding someone attractive was to understand if icons used in social apps were used to help users interact with others in similar ways.

To understand if my hypothesis was valid, I created a survey where users were asked to give their feedback on icons used as ice breakers from potential matches, understanding how those icons were perceived when the users were at the receiver end of the interaction.

Prototype testing

After the survey, I created 3 low-fidelity prototypes with the different ice-breaker icons/interactions that were selected during the survey,

Prototype scenarios simulated a real dating scenario.

Messaging and Waving directly to users’ profiles were perceived as facilitators to start a conversation without showing too much affection.

How Might We

overlap users' niche behavior as one common UX foundation for the platform?

Communicating.

Messaging.
The waving feature was included within the messaging as a one-time option in case users didn’t know what to say.

Made it to today's screen.
Users now can see who made it to the platform. Featuring a saved profile with a bigger picture for easy recognition.

A Dynamic Color Palette.

During the interviews I gathered feedback on the swiping pattern, where users specify that at some point the behavior became automatic, finding themself lost in unconscious swiping either to the left or right.

Colors were added to swiping behavior to highlight each decision and avoid automation.

Helping deciding on a potential match.

Informative profiles filled with answers to questions that are meant to show character traits of the users and a set of pictures to facilitate starting conversations and making a conscious selection on a match

O3

Designing to improve engagement.

Voting onboarding.

An instructions screen was created to onboard new users.

Swiping.

I substituted the buttons for saying yes/no to profiles, swiping allows you to interact with the candidates' pool faster.

Sliding down.

Intended as a neutral way to vote profiles, eliminating the binary voting system.

Customer Journey across Apps

I made a review of the previous research to find commonalities to the company's 3 most used dating services:

Users constantly reported that the apps didn’t allow them to communicate and an approach matches in similar ways to real-life dating situations.

Those findings shaped the customer journey.

Elite Single

Female users were more hesitant to use icons since they didn’t want to express affection to strangers

Don't know what to

expect when liking a profile.

Jswipe

App felt a bit of an overkilled with so many icons to communicate when users were looking for serious dating

Super-like was used when blown away by a profile.

Attractive world app

Voting kept users engaged in the community since they open the app every day to see new applicants and voting them in or out

Voting gives a sense of control in the community.

Common to all

Swiping right-left interaction becomes meaningless.

Sometimes there is not enough information to decide on someone and users will prefer to have some kind of skip option

Research, High fidelity wireframes, prototype

Role

Type

Platfrom, Interaction Design

Spark Networks

Company

Spark Networks owns several online dating platforms that target niche groups, such as senior users to people with the same religious beliefs or ethnicity.

With new apps thriving based on their large user base appeal, the niche competitive advantage decreased, forcing the company to come up with new ways of engaging people, however since some of the brands were created on different platforms, making it hard to maintain and improve efficiency, migration to one platform became neccesary.