“Ice Breaker” feature for Tinder

A case study and lesson on accessibility

As part of my bootcamp experience, was I asked to design a feature for Tinder that functions as an ice breaker between users and leads them into having a conversation. I was really happy to receive this specific task since I am a user myself and realized how such a feature could improve the user experience and help 𝚞̶𝚜̶𝚎̶𝚛̶𝚜̶ humans to eventually improve their quality of life. It’s not always easy to get to a level of harmony with a person of interest, which lets you get to know them and talk effortlessly — so I attempted to tackle this issue with a lot of joy. Here is my process:

The Problem

To dating app users this should sound familiar, you swipe right, match with a person of your interest, and then you don’t know what to write, lose touch after a while of small talk, superficial topics and conversations that lead nowhere or you don’t even get a reply in the first place… Communication is a complex process — for some, it comes naturally but for others, even thinking of it causes stress and anxiety. According to a survey I conducted have all participants difficulties initiating a conversation, most of the time or at least sometimes, it also showed that all participants prefer to use messages to start a conversation prior to video calls, GIFs, pictures etc.

Further research showed complementary results, such as a study by Jennie Zhang and Taha Yasseri from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, which looked over a two-year period at how 400,000 heterosexual singles in 30 of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States communicated online. Their data showed that a massive 39% were never replied to, and 11% of all conversations didn’t exceed two messages.

User Persona

After evaluating the survey results, researching the user group of Tinder and holding interviews with tinder users, did I get a clear picture of whom the users are and what their needs and frustrations are. Please meet Mai:

Competitor Analysis

The most popular dating apps in Germany other than Tinder are Lovoo, Badoo and Bumble. I had a look at what features they are offering and what they might be missing.

Lovoo — Lovoo actually has a feature they advertise as Icebreaker, it allows users to send a message to a person of interest without having to match first.

Badoo — They have very good tips on their blog on how to break the ice, but do not offer any built-in features.

Bumble— Featurewise is Bumble the strongest competitor, Question Game lets users select a wide variety of questions to ask, the outcome will be shown once both users have replied. Just recently (after I created the feature for Tinder) was Night Out introduced. Also, a very strong feature, it’s more than a conversation starter, it is a way of meeting and interacting with your match digitally in times of a pandemic and social distancing. To sum it up, the users can play trivia while being on a video call.

Ideation

All the previous steps gave me a better understanding of the user and their needs and what is already available, once I was ready to tackle the issue I asked myself:

How might we make it easier to break the ice between users and help to start a sustainable conversation?

I used the brainstorming method “Crazy 8” in which I sketched eight distinct ideas in eight minutes into eight sections of a piece of paper. A gamelike feature that lets users select from a variety of games which they then enter, came up as an idea and after working further on this idea I continued with creating lo-fi sketches and developed them into mid-fi sketches and further on into an interactive prototype.

Mid-Fidelity Prototype

I did test the prototype with dating app users, got valuable feedback and then asked my tutor for further feedback on the mid-fi prototype, he then introduced me to the topic of accessibility, which we haven't learned about at this point, but his input made me research and learn. What I found out was eye-opening and once again made me understand even more the responsibility we as designers have. I applied my learning to the hi-fi prototype then tried a lot of variations and used plug-ins such as A11y and Able for checking the contrast and so on.

The Solution

After applying all changes, I did further refinements when testing the hi-fi prototype, here is the final outcome:

Further Steps and Learnings

What would be next is designing the game opponent screen, since they have to choose, at least in this example, what they decide to be true and what not. Other games would also need to be designed and tested. As already mentioned was this task also a huge lesson on accessibility, this is the biggest takeaway from this challenge.