Re-designing friendfinder.com’s app
How I designed friendfinder.com’s app to make this product more unique and visualisation.
FriendFinder is a popular and widely-used dating and entertainment websites in the world. It’s the world’s first and by far the largest adult dating network with one goal in mind: bringing in like-minded people together for fun, intimacy and love.
The challenge
Compares to other dating apps, FFC does not have many features to attract people to use their app. FFC’s UX and UI seem to be old-school and not so user-friendly. In the following, I analysed tinder, badoo and bumble’s UX and UI; then finally talk about why I think FFC’s user interface is not so appealing for users.
Tinder
Tinder makes the users easier to have expectations and emotions of dating. Tinder’s user interface applied bright palette to make the users feel the right mood and playful animations trigger users to have more positive feelings.
Badoo
Badoo was intended to make the process more friendly and has high chances to receive matches. You can see people who liked you and you can click like back to match. However, privacy is an issue to Badoo. Cambridge University has given Badoo the lowest score for privacy among the 45 social networking sites examined.
Bumble
Bumble makes the process more female-friendly. It requires women to message their male matches first. And Bumble’s user interface applied bright yellow that helps set safe feelings, happiness; the overall screen looks sleek and concise. These designs allow people to build a trust and serious relationship. However, for men, waiting for messages from female matches might feel waiting a long time.
My role
User Experience Design, UI Design
Pain points
The information on FFC’s website is overloaded for users. Mostly, users are lazy to read words and they want to see something immediately. In terms of FFC’s UI design, FFC wants to recruit more new users as well as to emphasise their features. The solution FFC came up is to place a CTA banner and show up the functions they have, like community, webcam chat, members on their website. However, for people, these are simply words and information. As far as I am concerned that it is better to apply the functions on UI and UX on FFC’s website. It will be a better solution.
User needs
Most of FFC’s users are singles; they use this app to find out serious relationships/marriage. As a result, I paid attention to create a feeling of safety, having chances to meet new people and get deep understandings of people. In this case, users are only allowed to upload a 15-second video which uses to introduce yourself (users); people are free to share their interests, daily life and everything they want to share with others to help other users get more connections and interests on them. However, there are many functions only to advance members. That is, users have better to buy plus in order to experience plus functions. These functions are:
- You swipe super-like someone, but she/he doesn’t swipe like; you can continue following this person’s profile. If she/he posts a video, FFC will inform you immediately. Of course, FFC will show who has followed you and noticed you for a long time.
- For shy people, getting a match with someone, they feel nervous and do not know how to start a conversation. Users can play ice breaker games with your matches. Beyond that, FFC also shares some articles or tips which are used to help advanced users figuring out how to start the conversation with strangers.
- Webcam chat, advanced users can see people who are online to have a webcam chat now.
In terms of colour choosing, I picked pink to be the main colour and applied colour red to be the sub-colour. Because pink represents friendship, affection, harmony, inner peace, and approachability. However, large amounts of the colour pink can actually create physical weakness. In this case, colour red also applied to stirs up passion, aggression, and action to give confidence to those who are shy.
Wireframe
Mockup
Final
After iterations of design, user interview and usability tests, I created a high-fidelity interactive prototype of the app in Sketch. The users mentioned that they play this app for finding true love; they do want to get married a.s.a.p. Base on this sense, this app will cooperate with wedding studios, restaurants to promote wedding photographs, candlelight dinners to create a romantic vibe. This will help to trigger the couples or singles want to get married or go out for dating soon.