Love in The Digital Age

Project Type: Research Group & App Design Individual

The Brief

Love in the digital age was a project that tasked us with the challenge of creating an app for finding love, maintaining love or life after love. We were in teams for the initial reseach and then began to develop our own concepts for an app.

Research

I was paired with Conor and we began our research by exploring the many themes in love and dating in contemporary society. We then individually interviewed a variety of people to further see what the main challenges in finding love were.

Making Senses: Persona and Scenarios

From our interviews and co creation myself and Conor pooled our data and began to make sense of our research. We unpacked our findings by transcribing the interviews and sorting themes and commonalities. From here, we could pull out meaningful insights. We were then able to create three personas; the nervous dater, the focused dater and the causal dater.

It became apparent, that each group had very specific challenges. I focused my app on the focused dater; people who went on frequent dates, used many apps but were having issues finding quality matches and lasting connections. They are active seekers or love and know what they want.

Interviews & Co Creation

I began by interviewing two groups of people and then proceeded to co creation with each group.

I wanted to understand peoples expectations of dating. We aimed to build a dating app for users disillusioned with current dating apps. To do so it was essential to understand what the users expectations in dating was.

By inviting co workers of varying ages to draw their ideal dating timeline, I was able to establish a sequence of events that they user wanted. It also highlighted their end goal. This was of interest as is the end goal of dating a relationship, a date, a marriage? It was unclear what people wanted and this was an issue for current dating apps.

I tested this method on two groups of people; Woman 22-30 and Men 22-30. In each group the tools I provided pens, pages and explained the rationale. We talked first about dating; the good, the bad and ugly.

Concept - AI Dating Assistant App

My research had highlighted users issues with creating sincere profiles and how it initiate conversation. This led my to consider using AI and a dating assistant. The AI would scrape the users online data from every email, What's app and Instagram like and build a profile for you.

'Ali the dating assistant' would become the best friend you never knew you needed. The app would use an AI chat function to advise on dates, help break the ice with other matches and be a support to users on their dating journey. Ali was to be a smart AI using your data to become a friend, use the language you use and relate to you as a close confidant would.

To test the validity of the concept I began paper prototyping. From here I was able to test the concept on a people and get immediate feedback. I had built a video AI into the initial concept but found out quickly that people were mistrustful of a video AI 'friend' and saw it as an unnecessary add on. This allowed me to amend the idea, iterate and test a chat function with users. This proved to be far more successful and useful to potential users. I then built a medium fidelity prototype and again tested it with a group of dating app users.

The feedbak then allowed me to make final amends and begin building the high fedelity prootype.