How can we ensure the safety of U of T students when using online dating apps? In collaboration with University of Toronto's Innovation Hub, my team of 5 designed a solution to help users feel comfortable and safe when using dating apps. I led the UX research and evaluation to ensure our team gains meaningful insights to inform our design strategy.
Client: Collaboration with UofT’s Innovation Hub
Role: UX Research and Evaluation Lead
Team: Sheldon Chen, Stephanie Le, Harpal Sogi, and Siwen Wang
Platform: Mobile (iOS)
Tools: Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Miro
Sector: Student life
Dating in the 21st century will always include the use of dating apps. Tinder, Bumble, Hinge are popular dating apps to name a few. University of Toronto students are struggling to find romantic interests that they can believe in and trust, when the dating apps have so many faults and safety risks.
One True Blue provides opportunities for dating app users to get to know each other in long-term activities first before making the right decisions and love blossoms.
Our team came up with questions for questionnaires and follow-up interviews to understand students' personal experiences surrounding the safety and privacy issues of online dating.
We received 20 responses from questionnaires and 5 out of the 20 volunteered for a follow-up interview.
From our questionnaire, we noticed there are concerns safety surrounding identity thefts, fear of catfishing, men lying about looking for a long-term relationship, and falsifying their profiles. Surprisingly, friends was the most common method of assuring safety (mentioned by 6/20 participants).
From our researched data, we gathered our participant's profiles, needs, desires and obstacles and summarized it into a representative persona called Jane. We often referenced Jane onwards when designing solutions since she is a specific key user (more on why personas are important)
Our team wanted to ensure we're designing solutions to meet Jane's needs, which in return meets our users needs. We defined some statements that highlighted Jane's needs and used it as a guide for ideation.
Based on Jane’s needs, our team generated more than 50 ideas onto sticky notes using the crazy 8 method. As a group, we categorized ideas into themes. Surprisingly, punishment was our top theme (12 ideas), followed by Verification (10 ideas) and Activity (10 ideas).
We used the “dot voting” method to find ideas that are the most feasible and impactful to move forward with. We each marked 4 green dots for impact and 4 red dots for feasibility on ideas we felt fit.
We digitalized and moved the ideas with votes onto a prioritization grid to see which ones we thought were the most impactful and feasible. We decided our main ideas for our prototypes were the following: Profile made by other (highest big bet), Misconduct = Punishment (close home run that was impactful), Hobby groups (most feasible).
We used IBM's Hills as a way to set measurable goals for our ideas so that Jane to meet her needs.
We drew lo-fi storyboards as a quick way to visualize the flow of how ideas can turn into features.
Our team tested with 4 participants using the think-out-loud and 5-seconds research method for a quick lean evaluation. We moved forward with Hobby Groups because our participants found that idea to be the most interesting and impactful. We also highlighted usability issues to improve for our Mid-Fi.
Our team took the feedback and refined the app to create a clickable Mid-Fi to further test and improve the usability. We also named our app One True Blue.
Our goal ultimate goal for this evaluation was to identify if emotional investment with One True Blue is reduced and if users would feel more comfortable and feel safer using our dating solution than traditional dating apps. We had 4 participants and Zoom to share screen and Otter.ai for transcripts. We started think-out-loud which is a method of observing users going through various assigned task to evaluate usability. Then we ended with a follow-up interview for feedback on their overall experience of the app. The feedback overall was positive.
Canadian Women's Foundation. (2019, July). Cyberviolence and online hate against women: Learn the facts. Canadian Women's Foundation. Retrieved November 16, 2022, from https://canadianwomen.org/the-facts/online-hate-and-cyberviolence/
United Nations. (2021, December 3). Cyber-violence: A gendered threat. United Nations Western Europe. Retrieved November 15, 2022, from https://unric.org/en/cyber-violence-a-gendered-threat/
Vogels, E., & Anderson, M. (2021, June 5). Dating and relationships in the Digital age. Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. Retrieved November 15, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/05/08/dating-and-relationships-in-the-digital-age/