Lead Insights & Strategy Designer | Kat Reiser
Product Designer | Victoria Marie Williamson
Engineer | Kristen Raffanti
CHALLENGE
Our team investigated changing patterns in dating and entertainment behavior. We identified four fundamental trends shaping how dating has shifted in the past year and how consumers choose to fill their time.
Online dating and cultural power shifts have made a difficult journey worse. Nearly half of U.S. adults (47%) say dating is more challenging today for most people compared with ten years ago.
Amid new risks of seeing lots of people in a shorter timespan, many daters are opting to take their time before meeting IRL (in real life).
The most valuable collections no longer live in the home; they live on your Instagram feed. 74 percent of Americans prioritize experiences over products.
Apps have obscured the goal of connection with video game mechanics, with dehumanizing results. Time spent swiping is one of the biggest predictors of anxiety linked to dating apps.
APPROACH
10 user interviews were conducted and informed the team's understanding of where opportunities lay. Journey mapping was critical to understanding where we could intervene to improve the online dater's experience.
Building the profile was a struggle for many of the daters we interviewed. They also expressed frustration with the large amount of effort they put forward compared to the people they were messaging. Many people felt like they carried the conversation and showed more interest than their matches. The emotional labor needed to get to the point of proposing a meeting in person often felt like it was not worth the effort for fear of rejection.
Most people fantasize about finding their love interest outside of the dating app. We must create points of connection that feel unique and valuable. We needed to create a system to bring back kismet, so our users felt like they were starring in their very own rom-com.
Many people create dating profiles based on what they believe their audience wants, rather than a reflection of who they are. They believe the profiles they see are artificial or insufficient. Daters reach out to friends for advice to offload some of the stress of building their online personas.
Swiping may be addicting, but the space between matching and meeting IRL (in real life) is hard. Messages often go quiet, and scheduling is a chore. Most connections do not meet in person because there's too much effort on the users to make it happen.
When considering the entire system of entities involved in dating beyond the apps themselves, we identified an unexplored business opportunity:
The work of setting up a place and time to meet can be done by the app, relieving the user of the task and offering an opportunity for local business owners to get on daters' radars. Whether it's a ceramics class or a pop-up cocktail bar, the chance to try something new with someone new could entice daters.
RESULT
Chance is a dating app where users pick what they want to do before they pick the person they are going with. To see the fully-rendered concept:
Early concept sketch
Reach out if you want to learn more about my work or simply have a chat over coffee.
Kat Reiser | Made with ❤️ in Chicago | 2021