Project Overview

Helping people date with purpose

Fireside bridges the gap between dating apps and having a real relationship. Through intentional, introspective prompts, people can message on a deeper level and discover more about themselves individually and together.

At the time, Fireside’s primary focus was on nourishing and guiding two people in the dating phase of their relationship. Because of this, both people would need to be fully onboarded and participating in order to interact with the app. We wanted to not only give a single person the ability to interact with the app while their invitee was still pending, but also provide them with concrete, personalized, and insightful feedback about their own dating expectations and goals.

Problem

How do you know what you want?

Only 10% of people using online dating (apps, etc.) enter a committed romantic partnership, yet 44% say they’ve turned to online dating to meet a long-term partner.
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‍The User Problem
Active daters lack an intuitive way to explore relationship goals, expectations, and needs.
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‍The Business Problem
Extremely low levels of engagement after onboarding.

So we asked ourselves... How might we create more meaningful connections in the dating phase that leads to long lasting healthy relationships?

Our efforts overlap with two booming industries, online dating and personal/relationship counseling, validating there’s an audience and value.

Final prototype

A connected way to self reflect

Research-backed psychology frameworks integrated into an intuitive messaging-style feature available for single or partnered members.

Research and Insights

Talking to people on the street

In our interviews, we discovered that our target user sometimes had trouble breaking into deeper relationships with friends and partners. This often stemmed from a lack of understanding of their own needs and what they wanted out of a romantic relationship. To effectively have more concrete and deep relationships, users first needed to learn how to have that understanding with themselves.

What already exists?

To get a better understanding of how companies were approaching similar problems how people were familiar with getting what they need, I looked at other apps in the personal growth, journaling, and relationship space.

An opportunity I found was to design more personalization into the app. By using the data input by people to curate a personal experience they would be able to get more out of what they put in.

Other takeaways from this exercise was that currently people used these for expressing thoughts (journaling) and having a place to organize the discoveries they had about themselves or partner.

Let’s plan this out

"Discover who you are on a deeper level" was the guiding principle in my user flows. With this and the competitive research I designed a flow called Quests.

After some discussion we realized that this flow, while potentially better for the user, was more effort than the team wanted to commit at the moment. We compromised and decided to focus just on the Discover phase of the flow.

Frameworks, personal values, and history

Our focus for Journey was now just on providing content that could help people on their exploration to a better connection with themselves.

This content was in the form of information, quizzes, and prompts. We decide that we could leverage researched backed content in order provide people the most effective and timely value.

We used phycological frameworks such as attachment style, Enneagram, Myers Briggs, etc. to create quizzes that would help people understand where they were at. Most of this research was done by Stone, the Product manager. We also created prompts that helped people explore and understand their values and their past relationship experiences.

The Structure

By bringing in engineering early an often, we discussed ways to make their life easier. The main design objective we decided on was to reuse components that already exist as much as possible and limit new components

I took the existing structure of the Fireside section of the app and applied our user flow and ideas to the components we already had. Everything created in the wireframes had already been built on the back end so the engineer lift was super light.

Final Screens

We needed to create a color palette that was distinct enough for people to know they were in a different section of the app, but still flowed with the global aesthetic. This was tough with the gradients but we settled in on this gradually cooling color scheme that allows the users to settle in and feel more comfortable answering tough questions about themselves.

Reflections

I think this solution definitely leads a person to understanding more about themselves and to potentially finding a long-term relationship that aligns with them. This version is currently in Beta, but I moved on from the team before any testing was finished. To me though, success came in the form of leveraging what already exists to help people, working seamlessly with engineering to make sure we hit our timeline objectives, and designing something with the future in mind.