Facets: Dating with dimension
In a fast-paced world of dating apps that are gamified, Facets is a dating app that encourages a true reflection of who you are and building genuine connections. Built so your friends can help curate your dating profile, Facets provides a platform that slows down the meet-cute process so you can truly find the one.
Duration
Sep 2023 - Dec 2023
Client
Drexel University
Services
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Senior capstone project
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UI/UX design
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UX research
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Brand strategy
Our junior project is a web application – a dating app called ‘Facets’ which encourages more genuine relationships where users can invite their friends to the app to contribute to their dating profile and help them with the matching process. The app is gem-themed, highlighting the different facets of a user where each facet (or scrollable page on their dating profile) is a page written by either the user themself or by a friend. A single facet includes written answers to prompts along with pictures to contribute to a well-rounded dating profile composed of multiple facets.
My role
Led UX research - Identified our target audience, conducted interviews and usability testing to find key pain points, and researched current dating apps to identify what can make Facets unique and effective
Supported UI design - Designed UI elements and explored visual branding on Figma
Assisted front-end development - Added styling to components in our React Native build and used Github to merge updated components
Our goal with Facets
To make a more authentic and genuine online dating experience, we aimed to create a mobile dating app that allows users' friends to create profiles for them to help showcase the best sides of them from different perspectives.
Understanding our users
Target audience
Identifying our prime audience is a major priority and will help inform us what features will be valued for the app, what demographics to look for when we recruit people for user interviews, and will anchor our design decisions down the line. Generally, we identified our target audience to be young adults ages 18-36 living in the United States in urban or suburban areas. Facets' main audience is composed of people who want to know more about someone before matching with them, have friends who can help build their profile, and more inclined to the social and community aspect of dating.
Understanding our users
User personas
To further understand our users' goals and needs, I created three user personas who align with our target audience but come from different backgrounds and have different expectations when it comes to online dating.
Understanding our users
Empathy maps
I created two empathy maps (one for David and one for Laura) to note down what they would each hear, see, say/do, think/feel, gain, and would feel pain for with regards to dating apps and also their friends' experiences with relationships and dating apps.
UX Research
Competitor Research
There are many popular dating apps in the market today–to make Facets an app that encourages genuine connections and put an end to the endless scrolling of potential partners, we analyzed a few dating apps to understand their strengths and weaknesses. We found that Hinge has a guided account creation process and has prompt questions for users to answer that we liked, but it indulges in endless scrolling and some features (likes specific filters) are behind a paywall.
Overall, we noted benefits across different apps that we wanted to incorporate into Facets (friends answer questions about the user like in Blindmate, prompt questions like in Hinge, both users have to like each other before messaging like in Tinder), while also building our unique feature of having a multi-faceted user profile.
Facets: Prototype Design
The key differentiator: "Facets"
Our core feature that sets Facets different from other dating apps is having a multi-faceted profile. The user fills out information and prompts to create one page for their profile. When they invite their friends to the app to contribute to their profile, their friends would fill out prompts and upload pictures on their end that would save as a separate page on the user's profile.
This way, a person can have multiple pages (can be swiped left and right to view) that showcase different sides and perspectives of their personality, making their presentation more authentic and community-based.
Facets: Prototype Design
Mid-Fidelity prototype and usability testing
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The final product
Facets
Since we were a small team wearing many hats, I helped the designers and developers program some of the components and features of the app to have updated styles on the front-end side. The final product well reflects our final prototype–creating an account, beveled edges on profile cards, the ability to scroll vertically on profiles and horizontally to flip through different facets, and the ability to refresh the page to see a new set of people.
What this project has taught me
The final product is something we're proud of– 6 months of perfecting a gem-themed app for people to make true connections. Through this project I've learned of the great value that is understanding your user. Surveying people of our target audience and learning what are motivators for finding a relationship in the online dating scene really helped us shape our features and build our product.
Working on Facets also encouraged me to seek out jobs to work on where help is needed when I don't have as many tasks on my plate. Since we had short deadlines, I helped where I saw help was needed–with the design team to brainstorm UI elements, with development and front-end programming, and with content management to ensure everything was ready to go for both the designers and development side to integrate.