Date.com is one of more than a dozen dating properties owned and operated by digipunk, llc. The entire suite of dating sites had been designed and built around 2005 — and they looked and felt that way. Following a management shake up, an opportunity to rethink the entire business and platform arose. I was brought on board to help head up the effort to re-examine and rebuild their product offering, business and subscription models, branding and brand voice and to lead the entire user experience, visual design and front-end development process.
Director of Product and User Experience delivering product and UX strategy and definition, competive analysis, wireframing, prototyping, brand design, copywriting, visual design, performance analytics and leading the design and front-end dev teams. Below are examples of the product design process and a few of the UX design artefacts created during the definitional phases of the project.
I began the challenge by conducting an extensive competitive review of the industry. A lot had changed in the online dating world since the original suite of digipunk dating sites had launched. We took a deep look at dozens of sites and apps’ unique selling points, best-practices, missed opportunities, customer flows, business models, value propositions, aesthetics and language. This analysis was not only great for helping to define the product and project goals but was also a boot camp in modern web technology, capabilities and communication styles for the existing stakeholders. We also explored how micro-services and 3rd party service providers would help make the platform as flexible, scalable and efficient as possible.
After studying the competitive analysis, the team was highly motivated to participate in some blue sky, big picture thinking. I lead workshops with stakeholders from business, marketing, product and technology to achieve alignment on goals, assumptions and requirements. This was a great opportunity to introduce User Centered Design Thinking and get everyone thinking in terms of User Pain Points, Tasks To Do and User Journeys.
With a set of priority features and user flows established, we began working on functional user flows to get the development sprint process started while we continued to interate on user flows and ultimately building wireframes and prototypes (shown below). We tested and validated these prototypes and established some baseline user journeys that we could then run A/B tests against in a live situation.
While we were iterating on wireframes, feature definitions and beginning the build process, I had a lot of fun working on new brand aesthetics and brand voices for many of the properties which ranged from general dating sites (date.com, matchmaker.com) to niche sites based on religion, demographics or affinity groups such as dating for lovers of geek culture (gk2gk.com).
At the same time, we were educating the stakeholders on the advantages of a modern technology stack with a cloud based microservices driven back-end architecture supporting highly responsive front-end built on React.js. The goal was to build one highly configurable platform that could handle all of the dating brands including variations in layout, registration flow, premium features and subscription models. For UX/UI designers and developers, React.js has several advantages including its component based nature and ability to have much of the application logic on the front-end as well as leveraging React Native to build crossplatform apps with the same logical code base.
One of the uses of this prototype was to test and validate a new perspective on the user sign up and onboarding process. We asked only three questions on the landing page and from that point on a user can view search results related to their preferences, location and age while continuing the sign up process.
Another novel approach that we ran experiments with was using sentence structure based data gathering to allow users to self select for personality types and affinity groups. Asking questions like "Are you more likely to get hurt on the climbing wall or falling off a bar stool" allows us to get beyond check box inputs and makes the process more fun while establishing the brand's playful voice.
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