Lento

The Scope

problem

People look for a long-term relationship upon entering the dating world.

Over 66% of the users interviewed responded that their main reasons for dating were companionship that allowed them to spend quality time and to share their values, daily life, habits, personal growth, and interest.

However, people can't find enough a genuine connection.

While they wanted to meet someone who already had common interests, they feared having bad experiences such as being catfished, having a lack of matches, and meeting people having different lives than what was shown on the profile. And these concerns created more barriers for the users to use a dating app to start a new relationship.

They also stated that the "talking stage" to break the ice was the most challenging part when finding or starting a relationship due to fears, doubts, or insecurity about themselves.

Even in a dating pool, users were still frustrated to make genuine connections and find significant others for meaningful relationships despite the algorithm or personalized filter based on their preferences.

goals

After this survey, we aimed to make it easier for users to curate who they are that could be more in-depth and enable users to feel more comfortable and find better compatibility from other users’ profile pages that contain more human touch. Additionally, we wanted to allow users to have an easier phase to “break the ice” by having something in common other than hobbies or activities.

The Research

user persona

Based on the user research, we created our user personas to better understand their needs, empathize with their frustration, and easier to create a user flow.

User Persona

user Flow + User journey Map

With the user persona, we developed an ideal user flow and user journey map to resolve their pain points and capture users' emotions through their journey.

User Flow + User Journey Map

Competitive analysis

To get a better insight into the services that existing products provide to users and other features that our product could cater to our user persona, we researched 6 competitors in the market.

Competitive Analysis

The Design Process

wireframe

From what we achieved from the research stage, we then designed a wireframe that provided the idea of what specific features would cater to users’ needs.

Wireframe

ideation

Once we finished designing the user flow and wireframe, our group started to ideate different design ideations with various colour themes and designs that aligned with our user persona. Initially, a ping pong theme with light and pop colours seemed to represent our users in their 20s with a casual atmosphere. However, as one of the most significant user research results showcased that most users were looking for a genuine relationship with someone who shared more than commonalities in age or education level, we decided to focus on designing a space with an authentic and comfortable atmosphere using variation in beige to dark grey.

Lofi Prototype with a ping pong theme

Lofi Prototype with different colour themes

styleguide + logo

With the colour variation from beige to brown and dark grey, we achieved a sense of calmness in our app. We further pursued setting some friendliness for first-time users to feel welcomed and lifting the overwhelmingness of dedication. The choice of font Sen provided high readability and added amiability to our app.

Style Guide

As we wanted to highlight the core concept of our app, slow dating, we designed our logo with the shape of a snail with a simple line drawing. We named our app Lento which was the music terminology meaning slowly.

Logo Design

The Final Product

After making multiple changes and improvements to the prototype and design, we have created the final version of our high-fidelity prototype. The three main features that we focused on were the following.

Community page

Community Page

During the development, we put a lot of emphasis on our community page. This is where users are encouraged to ask or post meaningful questions that matter to them and answer questions from people they are interested in as well. By engaging in the conversation using our Q&A matching system before matching, users have the opportunity to get to know each other better and form more meaningful connections instead of a quick swipe based on a few profile images.

Live chat

Live Chat

In our initial user research, we found out that not an immediate response discouraged users from continuously using the app and even prevented them from building connections and engaging with others. Therefore, we wanted to provide an opportunity to communicate with even more diverse users over live chat regardless of topics of Q&A or profile preferences. This feature allowed users to not only build romantic relationships but also initiate another meaningful connection with those out of their scope.

for you page

For You page

However, despite having unique features like Q&A matching or live chat, some users still appreciated general recommendations generated based on their preference settings. For you page did not only provide general recommendations for users but also establish familiarity that even first-time users could feel familiar with using our dating app.

prototype

Check Prototype

Result + moving forward

We conducted a final user test with previous and new respondents. This final user test presented that our respondents had more favourable experiences. The feedback included the followings.

Lento established more comfort and confidence in initiating the approach and communicating with others.

Lento had an intuitive design and familiar flow despite two additional new features.

Lento created the environment enhancing more opportunities to interact and engage with others under various conditions(personal preference, taste in topics, or no conditions applied).

Even though more than 95% of our respondents answered that they could get to know new users more easily with less effort, there is still a lot more to develop this design. For example, Ice breaking mini-games could be implemented to help shy users to break the ice, lower the age barriers of target users, or motivate more first-time users to feel safe and comfortably use our app.

I will constantly search and try to improve Lento’s user experience even if our final design was delivered to the stakeholders. Until then, explore Lento and let us help you to step up your dating game!