JumboSmash

4 min readNov 21, 2017

JumboSmash is a Tufts Senior tradition. Students indicate who they are interested in and a curator connects those who match. Traditionally, this has been a survey; this year, the JumboSmash team decided to build a a cross-platform dating app that only worked for 1,318 Tufts Seniors during Senior Week in 2017. It was a huge success, with over 80% of the senior class on the app, 25k+ matches made, and 1 million+ swipes within the first 24 hours (5m by the end of the week).

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Why did we build it?

JumboSmash aims to celebrate our Tufts community, as well as to motivate students to reconnect with each other during senior week. Tufts students use JumboSmash to make new connections, friends, even romantic partners within the graduating class.

Our Team

Richard Kim: Team lead, mobile developer, now Software Engineer at Airbnb
Elif Kınlı: Backend / Server guru, now Software Engineer at Amazon
Jared Moskowitz: Mobile developer, now Software Engineer at Microsoft
Jade Chan: Mobile developer, now Software Engineer at Amazon
Bruno Olmedo: Experience Designer, now Designer at IDEO
Shanshan Duan: Experience Designer, now looking for a job ;)

How does it work?

Adopting the “swipe, match, chat” model from Tinder, JumboSmash offers a fun and engaging “matching” experience. As a verified Tufts Senior, a user can freely swipe on others’ profiles to trigger a conversation box. Although built on top of the Tinder model, JumboSmash had many design alternations that made it unique from the crowd of dating apps.

Process

1. Discover
To empathize our target users and discover unmet needs, we sent out a general survey to the graduating class of 2017 (with 219 responses), conducted user interviews, and analyzed as many dating apps as we could find to locate the market trend as well as discover new opportunities.

2. Define
Drawing insights from the initial research, we arrived to a list of areas to focus upon for further ideation:

How should we handle gender?

How to make it unique and different from Tinder?

How to foster a positive user-generated “ecosystem”?

How to make it fun to play with?

How to resonate with our audience (Tufts students)?

3. Explore

Designers and engineers on our team brainstormed together, proposing potential features like common tags, “thirsty-meter”, senior events calendar, etc. Meanwhile, designers explored feature-integrated flows as well as brand identity.