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BFF
The challenge
Bumble is looking to revamp their BFF feature, Bumble’s friend-matching is essentially a clone of their dating platform, so they want to evaluate the current effectiveness of this approach and determine ways to refine and add features to make the friendship search more effective
Our aim as a team was to understand what harbors good relationships/ friendships online. And in what circumstances do people revert to the internet to look for friends with the intention to eventually meet in person, so that we can better understand our audience's mindset.
The Team
Phillip Lee - UX Researcher and Designer
Chris Villa - UX Researcher and Designer
Sohayainder Kaur - Lead UX Researcher
My Role
Lead UX Researcher
Tools
Figma
Trello
Google Docs
Google Slides
Methods
User Interviews
Affinity mapping
User Journey mapping
Usability Testing
Moscow method, Prototyping
8 people told us about their experience looking for friends online.
We discovered 3 main takeaways
#1
The more work put into crafting the profile, the more seriously they are taken as a potential friend ( verify them as a person)
A well crafted profile will definitely attract my attention.
The more a person shares about themselves on their profile the more interested I am in connecting with them (ex: interests, images)
#2
It is easier to connect with people who have shared interests
If we have something in common it becomes easier to connect and relate to each others experiences.
#3
Creating meaningful relationships takes time, and finding common times to meet can be challenging
Scheduling time to meet with new people is time consuming
What would these problems look like in the life of a person looking for friends?
Say hello to Julia
A busy physical therapist who’s just moved to Los Altos, CA
Goals — Be able to find people with the same interests as me.
Needs- The ability to schedule a time to meet with new friends.
Pain points — It gets hard to coordinate her schedule with her new friend due to her busy schedule.
Behaviors — She is extroverted and open-minded and wants to make meaningful one on one connection with people.
View full persona here
To better understand the exact areas where there is a dip or hype in Julia’s experience, I decided to create a journey map to better assess opportunity areas for improvement
Picture this!
Julia has just moved to California and has downloaded bumble to try to find friends in her area. She doesn’t know what to expect but feels like the format might be similar to its dating platform so it shouldn't be so hard to navigate.
Julia's journey map
Julia's journey map
1/1
View full journey map here
Julia needs to find people with similar interests and find a way to schedule meetups with them at a time that fits both their busy schedules.
After looking over our how might we statements and opportunity areas, we came up with a lot of possible solutions. As we were running a sprint for 2 weeks I conducted a MOSCOW method plot to mark our MVP list, prioritizing features with the highest impact and the highest priority.
View, all how might we's here
Moscow method
Moscow method
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So what does it look like?
Build your bff
The interest feature, allowed users to input the qualities they were looking for in their friends, just like how they make their own profile, they can customize the profile of a potential friend they would like to match with. So that people can find exactly who they are looking for.
This feature already existed on bumble, we moved it up from the fourth level of interaction to the second.
Birds of a feather flock together
As most people prefer having friends that have similar interest as them, we highlighted the common tags on the users and the person being viewed’s profile. This way the users will be able to spot similarities between them faster, leading to them finding potential friends faster
Lets meet!
We added a calendar in the chat room, so that the conversation around meeting in person is not left up to chance but is a prominent action that needs to be taken. To fit both the individuals schedules, both users can plot their availability on the calendar, and when they plot the same day, it turns blue and indicates that both parties are available to meet on that day.
Swipe right, me like
Users have a reservation on swiping right and left on friends as that gesture is too closely linked to dating apps. Having a friends app linked with a dating app also doesn’t help that bias. So we changed the swiping gesture to moving up and down to make the friends app feel different in subliminal ways.
Moment of truth
User Testing
Confessions of our 8 critics
Back to the drawing board
I was surprised to see that none of our testers liked the interest feature, they did not want to put in qualities for their friend, they would rather find someone similar to them, than go through the extra work of filling of creating a preferred profile.
So in contrast to that they really liked the feature where the similar interests were highlighted, our assumption there was correct.
We decided to do away with the interest filter as it was not something the users were looking for, they were more concerned about matching with similar people.So in contrast to that they really liked the feature where the similar interests were highlighted, our assumption there was correct.
The calendar feature, although turned out as something users would enjoy as a feature, but could not understand our implementation . Different colors were meant to indicate the 2 different user and the blue was meant to indicate the common day that they both were free.
We added a legend to the calendar so that it is clearer to users which colors indicate what on the calendar.
The swiping feature was definitely a different users noticed and linked the change in interaction, although our prototype was too fast, and it didn’t give enough feedback to the user to determine what action had been performed.
We added feedback in the prototype for our swiping feature
Future steps
• Look further into the verification, and see how we can make it safer and more trustworthy.
• We wanted to go deeper into the journey of 2 people becoming friends on the app.
• From our research we found that people find group settings to be low pressure environments to make friends, we wanted to explore that and see how a feature for that could be beneficial for bumble or not.
• We wanted to look into providing more incentive for users to meet outside, bumble approved spaces.
• From research we found that friends of friends are more trustworthy so we wanted to explore possibilities of matching mutual friends etc.
• Conduct A/B testing for our calendar feature
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