Liv’s Love Pool
View Prototypes
To view the live website, click here
Timeline
2 months
My Roles
Team Project Manager | UX Product Designer | Stakeholder Point of Contact
Methods
Competitive & Comparative Analysis | User and Administrator Interviews | Affinity Mapping | User Persona Development | Problem Statement | Feature Prioritization (MoSCoW Map) | Site Mapping | User Flows | Sketching | Prototyping | Iterative Usability Testing |
My Team
UX Product Designer - Lucas Zambelli
UX Product Designer - Sam Colonna
UX Product Designer - Bengisu Halezeroglu
The Opportunity
Liv’s Love Pool began as a small startup run by founder, Olivia Atwood, who worked to matchmake users for quarantine-friendly phone call dates based on only 3 fun facts about each participant. Users submitted to join through a Google form, and all communications and marketing took place over text or Instagram.
The UX team was asked to build Liv’s Love Pool a website, and streamline the service as much as possible to align with user and admin needs.
Phase 1: Research & Synthesis
Competitive Analysis
To start, our team wanted to understand the dating service market. We conducted an analysis of Hinge, Tinder, Bumble, Match.com, OK Cupid, and Tawkify, LLP’s competitor and comparator companies. We examined their business models, features and methods for matching participants. By identifying the successes and failures in their approaches, we better understood how our product could differentiate itself and succeed in the dating tech space. Some of our key insights were:
• These companies are either mobile only, or responsive
• They have a strong connection with social media
• These companies don’t use newsletters or post articles
• Most of these companies ask extensive questions in onboarding
User Interviews
After studying the market, our team moved on to interview users. By hearing about real people’s experiences with the dating space, we hoped to identify how Liv’s Love Pool could help make it better for them.
• Users want to have fun with dating
• Users trust that someone who knows them well can match them with someone they'll like.
• Similar values and interests are necessary for a good match.
• Users dislike dating apps because they aren’t romantic and they provide an overwhelming amount of options to sift through
• Users want the services they use to be easy to use / understand
Stakeholder Interview
Though LLP consumers were our main focus for this project, we knew there was a secondary user of the product: Olivia. As the owner and admin of the business, she also had needs for the LLP experience, and we wanted to help her. We interviewed her about her experiences with running the LLP business and matchmaking all participants, and developed insights about her based on the conversation.
• Olivia struggles to keep track of all the information necessary to matchmake
• Olivia prefers to match with very little information
• Users often make mistakes on their end of the process, and that makes it hard for Olivia to execute her side of the operation
Phase 2: Define
To summarize our insights, we put together two personas who respectively represented the average primary and secondary users of LLP.
Primary Persona
The first persona, our primary user, was Catherine. Her goals, needs, pain points and behaviors were based on interview data from our 12 user interviews.
Goals:
• To meet and get to know new people
• To have similar values and interests with a match
• To have fun on dates
Pain Points:
• Dating apps are impersonal, oversaturated, and don’t foster real connection
• There is little information available about matchmaking services
Needs:
• Bios that represent personality
Behaviors:
• Trusts her friends to set her up with good people
Catherine currently struggles with meeting people she would consider a good match because dating apps don’t provide a platform that is personal enough. She can rarely get her matches to actually meet up, and even when they do go on dates, the conversations are boring, stunted, and there’s no spark, even if the guy looks good on paper.
Secondary Persona
Our second persona was Olivia. We would keep her needs, goals, pain points and behaviors in mind throughout our process of helping Catherine.
Goals:
• To make users understand that LLP is a fun, lighthearted experience, and to trust the process
• Provide users with at least one really good match
Pain Points:
• Keeping users' data and tracking up-to-date
• Not being fairly compensated for her work
Needs:
• An improved method of organizing and updating user data, and communicating with users
Behaviors:
• Matching also considers tone/vibe of users' responses
Phase 3: Design
Now that we understood both Catherine and Olivia, and had identified Catherine’s central problem, we developed a list of features that would help both our primary and secondary users reach their goals and alleviate their pain points.
Design Solutions
To structure how these features would fit together into a viable product, we created a sitemap of the front facing marketing site, as well as a flow of the onboarding process once users actually decided to sign up for the service.
Sitemap
User Flow: Onboarding
Platform Choice
We decided to take a mobile-first approach to the design process. Current Liv’s Love Pool users mostly interact with the service on their phones, since the existing model is based in texting and Instagram. Olivia planned to continue to rely heavily on her Instagram presence for marketing, so we knew users would likely come to the site through the app on their phones.
With a solid structure in place, we were able to start designing the site visually. We laid out the skeleton of the mobile site with low-fi sketches, then put together mid-fi wireframes to conduct initial user testing on the usability of the flow and layout of our screens.
Because we took the time to design and test iteratively, by the time we started creating our high-fi wireframes we were confident in the architecture of our design, and could focus on making it delightful and branded.
Phase 4: Usability Testing
Prototypes
With our high-fi design put together, we created a prototype and prepared to conduct a final round of user testing. We wanted to know if we succeeded at making users understand the process, and whether or not we made it easy for them to communicate with Liv, two of our central goals. For this reason we decided to test the following flows, which were key to communications and required the user to know the process, for usability and clarity:
Sign Up
3/5 users succeeded
2/5 users indirectly succeeded
View a match in your account
5/5 users succeeded
Give feedback on your date with James
3/5 users succeeded
2/5 users indirectly succeeded
Phase 5: Next Steps
Based on our final usability testing results, our team made the following recommendations for Liv’s Love Pool’s future iterations:
1. Add a succinct, clear communication of the function (blind matchmaking) and cost of the service to the homepage
2. Conduct further usability testing on the CTA’s - users expressed some confusion over the function of “Dive In” and “Date Feedback.”
3. Further build out the logged-in experience:
a. Expand the functionality of the “My Matches” screen to track whether or not users have gone on dates with their matches yet
b. Create prompts for the date feedback form to guide users towards providing meaningful commentary
Phase 6: Design Handoff
To allow for a smooth handoff, we created a detailed Style Guide and UI Components Library, which we gave to our front and back-end developers along with our high-fi wireframes and prototypes.
