The brief here was build and design a new feature to aim to show a selection of new personalised matches every 24 hours. These profiles will be people who best match the user and are recently active. The feature must be easily accessible to users with attempts to view any of these will take user to the Gold upsell to sell these ‘Top Picks’ as a Gold feature. If the user is a Gold member already then they will proceed to view the profile as normal.
Since the apps first release the user base of has rapidly grown with users all over the world signing up to the app from casual users who would use the app time to time to more persistent users who are more frequent in finding their partner.
With the surge in users growing into the millions the app became a lot more concentrated and finding a specific someone who best matches became that little bit harder ‘not in the sense there wasn’t many users to choose from’ but more in the sense that finding someone who is more compatible amongst the millions of users was hard to spot.
With the growth came a lot of requests on the app stores reviews to add more features for users to find their best matches with ‘Top Picks’ being a common request amongst the users. The features on gold at the time on the ‘Gold’ upsell was unlimited swipes, the ability to apply advanced preferences, and the ability to send a daily instant chat request.
The development of features means there is a goal in mind for what is trying to be achieved, in this sense it is obvious what is trying to be achieved which is finding the best possible matches but along with that there are some others:
⇒ Drive towards product future
⇒ Increase customer satisfaction
⇒ Increase profitability
In order to gather feedback I conducted user interviews with current users of the app to learn more about how users feel about the app which consisted of 3 questions which were a mixture of qualitative and quantitative questions, and were:
⇒ How are you finding your experience of using the app?
⇒ Have you ever met anybody (whether virtually or in person) from the app? If so, what was your experience?
⇒ What improvements do you think can be made to the app?
I interviewed a total of 24 users from the app which of:
⇒ 12 were Male (50%) and 12 were Female (50%)
⇒ 12 were between 20 – 30 years old (50%), 10 were between 30 – 40 years old (42%), and 2 were between 40 – 50 years old (8%)
Starting off with the question 'How are you finding your experience of using the app?', generally the feedback here was good from majority of the users but they felt that for paying a gold membership they weren’t getting enough compared to other apps on the market, hence some of the users did not feel to upgrade.
When asked if the users had ever met up with anyone through the app, 75% of the users had but most of those who did found that they were not the perfect match when meeting up and were pretty much of different pages.
Finally, after gathering the top four requested features on the app stores reviews I asked the users of which of these features would they like to see going forward, with Top Picks getting the most votes at 91.6% proving the research hypothesis matches the feedback from the mass user base.
From the user interviews carried out it became evident that vast userbase thought alike and as the findings proved this is a pain point and in order to grow the user base through and convert as many users as possible to 'Gold' this would need to be built.
Some interesting mentions during the user interviews:
⇒ Most of the interviewees have used online dating app before (22 out of 24 users).
⇒ 75% of interviewees have met someone from the app in person.
⇒ 66% of interviewees believe they could meet the right person via the apps.
Gold members feel they would like to stay away from the endless swiping and have a feature which will suggest them where who is most likely to best match with them.
As our findings conclude the users of the app are mainly here to find their special someone and this can be proved by the reviews left for the app stores so we needed to find a way where this feature can be implemented as the majority of the users on the app are looking to find their perfect match, get off the match and eventually get married.
The feature will work in the sense of an algorithm being built which:
⇒ Will display the most likely to match on top to least likely to match going down the list based on the user’s saved preferences
⇒ Profiles who are most likely compatible with user and have been online recently will only be displayed (no point in displaying a profile that has not been online for weeks)
⇒ Depending on swiping pattern - will looks at previous swiping pattern and suggests based on the swipes (e.g. if you swiped left on someone who smokes, you are likely to see less of them on your Top Picks)
The 'Top Picks' will be shown on the first tab on the Explore page.
If a user who has not purchased the 'Gold' upsell taps on any of the 'Top Picks' profiles (or the Top Picks CTA payment button on top of the Top Picks profile) they will be prompted with the payment model that they need to upgrade to 'Gold' in order to view the profile and potentially send them a like. If the users chooses not to purchase the 'Gold' upsell they can exit the payment model by tapping on the exit button on the top left hand corner of the model.
If a user who has purchased the 'Gold' upsell taps on any of the 'Top Picks' profiles they will be presented with the profile for the user to which they can view all details and pictures, send a like, pass, or direct message the user, or exit the profile by tapping the exit button on the top left corner of the profile which will take the user back to the Top Picks page.
Working on the Top Picks feature as part of the 'Gold' upsell was a major step towards customer satisfaction as well as a more advanced app meeting their goal which is to match muslim’s around the world and marry. This feature would minimize the noise coming from the feedback and is a great opportunity to boost the 'Gold' upsell as users are getting more for their money whilst making happy those who are currently on the 'Gold' upsell.