Be My Duo
A gamer dating all by gamers for gamers
About
Be My Duo is the first dating app for gamers, made by gamers, designed to diversify the dating scene with meaningful matches based on mutual interests. Their dating algorithm features the ability to take your gaming preferences into account, in order to bring together gamers from all corners of life with a high quality dating experience.
Timeframe
The creation of this app took 1 month
The Problem
The imbalanced male to female ratio has been a longstanding problem in the gaming world, and even more so in the dating world. Be My Duo seeks to tackle the commonplace problem of not having enough of the female demographic.
The Solution
Create a safe and comfortable dating experience for the female demographic by modifying the app’s onboarding process. Through interviewing and testing, we sought to discover what users value and expect from the registration process before they were brought into the rest of the app.
My Role
I was primarily focused on conducting two rounds of user interviews and testing in order to find out what female dating app users preferred during the onboarding process. I then helped my team iterate on the designs that were provided by the company, ran further tests with more users, and finally provided final changes to the design based on feedback from the company.
Research
Industry Leaders
Aside from interviews, important data was collected from industry leaders of online dating platforms. We performed this research in order to find out more about the dating app industry and to see what other industry leaders decided was best for the onboarding process.
Hinge
Asks many preference questions to complete a personality profile.
Many personality prompt questionnaires.
Many inputs for dating preferences.
Tinder
Available on mobile and desktop platforms.
Requires phone verification.
Asks many preference questions to complete a personality profile.
Bumble
Available on mobile and desktop platforms.
Requires phone verification.
Asks many preference questions to complete a personality profile.
Gives users 3 different modes to use the app (the type of relationships users are looking for).
Discovery
Research Plan
Before presenting users with the onboarding process prototype for usability testing, users were also interviewed on their past experience with dating apps. Participants selected for the first round of testing were primarily female, gamed regularly, or had experience with using dating apps.
Interview Questions
What do women look for in a dating app?
What features are appealing for a woman in a dating application?
How long and detailed should the profile creation stage of a dating app be?
Does a long account creation process turn users off from enrolling and using the app?
Interview Highlights
After conducting the interviews, we found several key takeaways that could be addressed quickly.
There were concerns about how long the onboarding process was, especially in regards to some questions that required a lot of time to fill out. People frequently asked if it was possible for them to skip some questions and move on to other pages, so they could quickly get into the app and start using it to see if it was worth their time.
There were also requests for personality prompts, such as written prompts and voice prompts, in order for potential users to improve the quality of the pool of users, in order to better show off their personalities early on.
Round 1: Usability Testing
10 participants were recruited and observed going through the onboarding process prototype as supplied to me by By My Duo. This step was required in order to see what users thought about the current onboarding process, and what pain points they would hit. It was important for me during this process to find out if there were any steps in the process that would cause users to pause or back out, instead of continuing the application process.
Findings
Due to the early nature of the interview process, findings were very limited, as I believe our interviewees weren’t sure as to the final nature of the product. Most of their feedback revolved around the visual design of the product, such as the font and visual design spacing. However, one conclusion we could draw from our first round of testing that carried over to our first iteration was that users found certain application pages to be overwhelming, or wanted time to think over what to write in, so these users requested a way to skip or hide certain parts of the onboarding process.
Round 2: Iterated Designs
After our first round of testing, we made significant changes to the application based on user feedback. These changes were then tested later on.
Basic Information
For the basic information page, we decided to break up the single page into three more pages in order to gather more data from users in an appealing manner, without overwhelming them with options. Also starting from this page, we added in a new “Skip” button that allowed for users to skip past longer questions that would take more time to fill out. We also revised the progress bar at the top to be more consistent and stand out more, so users could tell how far along they were in the application process. Finally, the Continue button was revised to be a more appealing color scheme to stand out better on the black background.
Dating Preferences
For the dating preferences page, we made several changes in regards to the options available. We changed the age range to something smaller and that made more sense, along with modifying some of the text. We also added more dating options in regards to what types of relationships people were looking for. Skip buttons were also added
Gaming Preferences
On the gaming preferences page, we rephrased some of the questions in order to be more concise. We also added more platform options, and added skip buttons
Availability Scheduling
For the Availability Scheduling feature, we made several large changes in order to better advertise this key feature. The first thing we did was add a new page that explains to users why setting your availability is important. The developers told us they absolutely wanted to make sure users used this feature, so we made sure to focus on emphasizing this tool. We also added in a new date selection button along with a brand new scheduling interface that was more intuitive for users to use.
Round 2 Usability Testing
Similar to the first round of testing, 10 new participants were recruited and observed remotely through Zoom. Participants primarily were either female, regularly gamed, or had experience with dating apps before. These users were then run through the latest version of By My Duo.
This second round of testing was much more fruitful than the first round of testing because we added many new features based on our previous interviews and competitor research, and were able to direct the flow of the interview more towards those newly developed features.
Findings
There were many new findings, several of which were highly actionable. One of the key findings was that users really wanted more ways to show off their personality other than simply filling out an “About Me” form, and mentioned that in other applications there were prompts that they could answer as a sort of icebreaker, to help them shape their responses. Multiple users who had children and pets mentioned that the app didn’t have a method of telling others that they had them. There were also concerns from users about disclosing their drug use. Finally, users mentioned if there would be an option for long distance relationships, and they wanted to let potential dates know they were open to these.
Final Iterations
Basic Information
The “Basic Information” screen was divided into two screens due to feedback on how overwhelming the information on one screen. An optional “Skip” button was also added to the bottom of the “Tell Us About Yourself” screen, so users could move on in the application process and come back later.
Dating Preferences
The top progress bar was changed to more accurately portray user progress. Font sizes were increased and kept consistent between screens. Optional “Skip” buttons were added to the bottom of screens for users unwilling to currently fill out the form. I added new questions regarding smoking, kids, and pets based on previous user feedback. Long distance relationships were also added as an option for users looking for that sort of relationship.
Gaming Preferences
“Genre of games you like to play” was changed to “Game Genres You Are Interested In”. “How often You play games and what console” was changed to “Gameplay Frequency”. Font sizes for subsection titles were increased. We also added more gaming platforms for users based on previous feedback in interviews.
Availability Scheduling
I created two new flows for the availability feature in order to make the process flow better and make more sense for users based on previous feedback. Some users during testing found it easy to use the drag and drop method select the dates they were free on, while others didn’t and said they’d prefer to manually type in their availability. As a result of this, I created different ways users could enter their information
Flow 1
The first method was the original tap based method that I previously created. Users tap on a date on the calendar and the following screens show. Users have the option to tap and drag their specific time abilities on the time slot menu.
Flow 2
This was a new feature I created in order to appeal to users who would rather manually add in the dates they were available on. To use this feature, users tap on the “+” button on the bottom right of the calendar screen and then manually type in their availability for specific dates.
Conclusions
Although there was onset concern over the length of the onboarding process affecting the engagement of potential users, a majority of users do not see length as a deterrent from completing registration.
In regards to the issue of balancing the male versus female demographic on dating apps, we discovered that there is no guaranteed way to increase the female demographic in dating apps based on the registration process alone. However, we did discover that creating unique ways for users to create a dating profile and attempting to be as inclusive as possible in the questionnaires helped users feel more comfortable to further use the app.
Another huge factor of experiences on dating apps relies on the individual users themselves. Whenever users encountered problems against other users such as being catfished or ghosted, many of which were very rare outliers. However, these problems can be combated through user verification (which Be My Duo will have with third-party account verification and user-to-user reviews).