Anoushka Sandeep

Facets: An Introduction

During the fourth year in UXID (User Experience and Interaction Design major at Drexel), we have junior project which runs between Fall term and Winter term – Fall term for the research, design, and prototyping phase and Winter term for refining the designs and then developing the project to be a functioning application. Once teams were settled, we confirmed the application idea and dove into creating a Gantt chart and kanban board on Jira to outline and assign all apprehendable tasks for the project.

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 would be 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.

Our goals for the features of Facets include the ability to invite friends to answer targeted prompts about the user, to view responses to prompts separately, to navigate through other users’ profiles, and to switch between looking for matches and helping friends.

For this project, we have used Jira for project management, Teams for communication and file management, Figma for design, and are using React.js for the app’s development.

My Role

There are five members on our team (project manager, UI designer, UX designer, content manager, and developer), and my role on this team has been the UX designer. My role has been more prominent during this term as we are in the research and design phase. It has been important for me to look ahead in our process and understand what research we need to complete that will best help us in our design process, and this has been facilitated by our team meetings so that we are all on the same page. Something I’ve learned while assuming this role is the importance in seeing the bigger picture, understanding the user’s needs and wants on a deeper level, and making sure that everything is cohesive and easily digestible.

Project Canvas

Below is our project canvas which I arranged based on notes we’ve made together as a team. This was a great exercise as all of our most valuable points – including our goals, risks, and success criteria – were all on one page. Some key takeaways from this is that the benefit of using Facets is the inclusion of friends to contribute to the user profile, the experience of meeting a match is more intentional and slowed down, and that it was impertinent that we flesh out the process for viewing different profiles.

Target Audience

Next, I arranged data to keep in mind when addressing our target audience. Knowing who we are designing for helps us to think of more specific concerns and interests that our users would have. For Facets, we are designing primarily for audiences who are 18-36 years old, live in the United States in urban or suburban areas, are interested to get to know a potential partner, and are comfortable with inviting their friends to the app to help them with the matchmaking process.

User Personas

The way that I approached this process of honing in on our audience is first loosely creating criteria for our target audience, then creating three different user personas who have different needs, and then revisiting the general target audience criteria afterwards. The following are the three sample users that I established. There’s Laura, a college student who is looking for a more genuine, slower-paced relationship. She’s someone who is more skeptical of people she meets online and internet safety and privacy is very important to her.

Next, there’s David. David is a 24 year old entrepreneur who is very involved in his worklife and is more introverted. He finds it difficult to put himself out there on the dating scene, and it would be very helpful for him to have his friends help out with the matchmaking process. He’s looking for a long term relationship and a meaningful companion in his life.

Finally, there’s Logan – a self-employed ceramicist who is looking to expand their social circle and find a relationship. Since they are self-employed, they tend to stay in their own area of the city and it becomes difficult to meet new people and to find a potential match. Unlike David, Logan enjoys a more relaxed lifestyle and works at their own pace, so finding someone who matches their energy is very important to them.

Empathy Maps

To further understand the users on the user persona, I had to step into their shoes. A great way to approach this was to create empathy maps. I created empathy maps for Laura and David, which include what they hear, say, do, see, think and feel, what they gain, and their pain points. These maps also helped to solidify a strong idea of who our target audience is.

Psychology Research

As our process furthered, we conducted more research to gain more understanding of the scope of our project. This includes a competitor analysis (on competitors like Tinder, Hinge, and Blindmate), the information architecture, and a SWOT analysis.

As the UX researcher and designer, I wanted to ensure that we attained as much helpful information about dating apps as possible so we could deliver a product that was more in tune with human wants and needs. I did this by reading through published articles that covered different topics on the psychology behind dating and dating apps – this exercise yielded a lot of valuable findings that definitely helped us make UX decisions more affirmatively.

Linked is a pdf of the research findings and the references to all articles used for the research. Some of the key takeaways are that dating apps help expand social circles, the language used in the app affects the experience (and all the top dating apps are broad-language based), and mobile vs desktop experiences activate different ways of thinking.

Next Steps

It’s been a very fun learning experience being a part of this team and designing an app together. This experience in particular stresses the importance of efficient project management, clear communication between team members, self-discipline when it comes to adhering to deadlines and delivering quality work, and how important your role is in the grand scheme of the project. We are a five member team which is quite small for researching, designing, and developing a web application in the span of 6-7 months. We’ve had to consistently meet at least once every week to unravel any tangled yarns of ideas and to make sure we were weaving clean patterns.

The next steps for this project is to revisit our prototypes and designs and finalize them as our developer continues to set up the React environment for the app. After completing our high fidelity prototype and additional rounds of usability testing phase, we will start dividing the programming roles between us. Our developer will be managing the back end of things, including structure and performance, while the rest of us will divide the front-end coding work and design and develop microinteractions.