Summary:
Q is an iOS native mobile dating app that offers LGBTQ+ members wider access to their community. When designing Q, our UX team began with the features that couldn’t be compromised. We conducted user interviews on the LGBTQ+ experience with mainstream dating apps and discovered several trends that warranted action such as: tailoring the feed to individual needs, creating more avenues of expression within the app, and capitalizing on the opportunity to build community by making more meaningful LGBTQ+ connections.
My Role: UX Research, Prototyping, UI Design
Duration: Two Weeks
Problem Space:
The current online dating space is not tailored to the LGBTQ+ community. Apps like Tinder and Bumble are leaders among dating platforms, and while they are LGBTQ+ friendly, they are not optimal for the LGBTQ+ audience. Our UX team set out to provide the LGBTQ+ community an inclusive space that is central to the their experience, empowering them to cultivate meaningful connections.
Solution:
To design an app primarily focused on building connections with choices for dating, friendship, or both for users within the LGBTQ+ community through curated content and various opportunities to showcase personality online.
Research Methods:
Competitive Feature Analysis
Comparative Feature Analysis
LGBTQ+ User Interviews
Affinity Mapping
Persona
Prototype Testing
Journey Map
Our UX team began with a competitive and comparitive feature analysis in order to determine how Q would compare to direct and indirect competitors in the space. Our team recruited 5 members of the LGBTQ+ community that had used a dating app within the last 3 months in order to gain insights on their needs, motivations, and pain points that would drive the design and creation of our app, Q. This information allowed us to form our persona, "Sam", design our prototype, and conduct usability testing.
Key Focus Areas:
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What features do LGBTQ+ dating app users find the most and lease useful?
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What are LGBTQ+ users main motivation for using dating apps, and as the apps stand do they help users meet these goals?
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How do the current dating apps address users needs as a part of the LGBTQ+ community?
Primary User Needs:
1. Curated Content
3. Community Access
2. Connections
4. Apps to be "queer"
Following user interviews our UX team was able to form a persona, an emobodiment of insights gathered from user research. To further understand a user’s current process on dating apps our UX team made a journey map that tracks how a user feels, thinks and what they do throughout a specific task. The research and synthesis are what drove our team’s design.
Users Mindset
Our users mindset is best summed up by the following quote from an interviewee: “Tinder, I don’t know, there’s not many ways to express your personality, it just feels like a hot or not list.” The LGBTQ+ community wants an app they can express themselves on, connect with new friends, and not be tied down to the binary “swipe left or right” notion within mainstream dating apps.
Design Style Guide
Our UX team used warm, friendly, inviting colors for this community focused app. We wanted the highlight to be our users profiles so our color scheme is purposefully muted to let our users shine and be the most colorful aspect of the app.
Prototyping
Our UX team ran usability tests on mid-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes in Figma to see user behavior and continue the conversation with LGBTQ+ users.
The Path Forward
The idea of breaking from the binary and creating something less black and white helped guide our decisions. To do so, our UX team recommends continuing with usability testing to refine the visual expression of our design. Our UX team made something for the grey area, the undecided, the certain, and the in-between. This is our vision for Q — connecting the LGBTQ+ community.
