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Revamping Bumble BFF by helping you find friends that share similar interests and help schedule meetups in the midst of your busy life.
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My Role:
Project Lead, UX researcher and designer
The Team:
2 UX Designers
Duration:
2 week sprint
Product type:
Mobile app
Challenge
Bumble BFF is a concept project, currently Bumble BFF is essentially a clone of their dating platform.
Our biggest challenge was to create an experience that is unique to its purpose and target audience while staying consistent with the other branches f the app, dating and business.
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 to better understand our target users.
Solution
We created features that helped users find people with similar interests as them quicker and provided a way for them to schedule their meetups more organically.
So how are our users different from those who use the dating app
8 interviews with people, who had used Bumble, meetup and facebook groups to make friends online.
3 key takeaways:
Well crafted profiles are more trustworthy.
Similar interests creates more inclination to connect
Finding common time to meet can be challenging
Who would download bumble to make friends anyway?
Say Hello to Julia!
Age: 26
Education: College Degree
Hometown: California
Family: Single
Occupation: Physical Therapy
A busy physical therapist who’s just moved to Palo Alto, 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.
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.
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.
Journey map
Journey map
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Project Goals
After identifying areas where Julia is struggling we identified some project goals
• Provide users with an easier way to schedules more organically.
• Match users with other users that share the same interests as them.
• Make the BFF section feel less like a dating app.
• Help users skip the awkward stages in the beginning of a relationship or conversation.
Ideation
As a team we conducted a brainstorming exercise to come up with solutions. Naturally we had too many ideas on the table to consider. So we used the MOSCOW method to identify feature ideas that that had the highest impact and which should take the highest priority.
MOSCOW Method
MOSCOW Method
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Whats working, what isn't and WHY!
Insights 1: It is easier to connect with people who have shared interests.
Our users told us they were not interested in creating a second profile as it was too time consuming. To tackle that we highlighted any shared interests between two profiles in the signature blue color, allowing users to quickly identify their shared interests.
Insights 2: Creating meaningful relationships takes time, and finding common times to meet can be challenging.
Our users told us that they were having difficulty understanding the color-coded calendar, which indicated which days were available for them to meet. To solve this problem, we added a legend to make it easier to understand what each color means, so they clearly know when each of them are available to meet.
We wanted to make the experience on bumble bff different from the dating app so we decided to do away with the swiping gesture
For our initial design, users were swiping too quickly and were not provided with sufficient feedback indicating what action they had just completed. To address this issue, we implemented a slight delay and placed the icon in the center of the screen, so users could visibly see the action they had just performed.
Ideas that got slashed
Through our user research, we discovered that finding friends online is not as daunting as finding a romantic partner. By implementing a feature from the dating app, the question game, we were able to decrease the discomfort associated with communicating with others online and alleviate tension.
Our findings suggest that users may potentially match with people who share similar interests and already have topics to discuss, making it easier to initiate conversations and create meaningful connections. Through this discovery we decided to do away with the question game.
As users tend to get overwhelmed with how many people they are speaking with online, we introduced a feature where you can speak with people who are online so you don't waste your time when you are on the app.
Surprisingly our users didn't really care about who is online, they were more concerned about replying to the people that had already messaged them back, so we decided to do away with this feature aswell.
Future Steps
Verification
One key insight that we received was that people were scared of getting cat fished on the app. It was one of our biggest insights but we decided not to pursue it as it was a matter of company policies, on how they verify users on the app. However there are many other ways you can verify people, through attaching social media links, or verifying mutual friends. I would love to investigate on another approach to verification separate from government ID’s.
Calendar
The calendar feature needed more testing and could be made more efficient by adding slots for times and a more flexible and detailed calendar that can also be linked to your google calendar for seamless integration into the users schedule.
Group Settings
Another large insight that we had was that group settings tend to be more favorable environments to meet new people who share the same interests as you. We decided not to pursue it as it is completely different from what the other two apps are offering, but it was definitely something to explore as a lot of users feel more comfortable in those settings
Lessons Learned
Be intentional in collecting metrics:
During the project, we carried out various research methods, and I learned that we could have benefited from more thorough documentation of our testing analysis. With data our design decisions have more credibility.
Document every time you blink:
I learned the importance of organizing documents. All the artifacts should be documented in various mediums such as Figma and Google Docs, and linked on Trello to facilitate finding and working on assets that require attention. This would have made the process of finding artifacts much easier for us.
You don't have to prototype everything:
I learned that we could have created simpler user testing prototypes if we had not tried to recreate the whole journey of a user downloading and using the app from start to finish. Only the aspects of the app that require testing should be prototyped; the rest of the app can be explained in a scenario.
Daily check-ins to conclude the work:
While working in a team, I learned that some tasks are done together, such as affinity mapping and making the problem statement, while others are done separately. Daily check ins helps us stay informed on what work is being done simultaneously so we can plan ahead and reach our deadlines easily.
Overall, I learned that keeping an open mind and being flexible when encountering challenges allowed us to adapt and improve our processes.
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