UI DESIGN, BRAND IDENTITY, USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN, APPLICATION DESIGN
Vedii, a foray into the world of dating apps
Vedii was a dating app launched by my startup, GigaPenguin, a company founded by myself and two peers I met in graduate school.
After successfully pitching the project to our tutors—a dating app that puts activities and shared interests at the forefront—we were accepted into the SFU VentureLabs program at Simon Fraser University. We had to create a high-fidelity prototype to help attract developers, angel investors, and advertisers interested in dating apps.
Client
Centre for Digital Media
GigaPenguin Inc
Medium
iOS/Android app, built in Figma
Scope
User Research and Testing
Market Research
UI/UX Design
Figma Prototyping
Team
Lam Kwan – UX Design
Isabel Hughes – UI Design, Brand Identity
Terence Yung – Development, Prototyping
Background:
After conducting ample market and user research, including a survey with over 200 participants Canada-wide, and numerous one-on-one interviews, we found the 5 major pain points for users of online dating apps were:
- Superficiality
- Ghosting
- Too few responses
- Wasting time on messaging
- Unknown intentions
Our Ideology:
With our research in hand, and a deep dive into the world of dating apps, exploring and testing the other services in a saturated market, we had to find our niche. We settled on our vision statement:
Unlike traditional dating apps which match users based on their standard profile, Vedii matches users based around an activity.
Less time spent messaging. More time on real dates.
Logo Process:
Originally called VIBE, we rebranded to Vedii as the name VIBE was already taken by several other apps. Then, we focused on establishing a strong brand identity that needed to:
a) showcase the overall intention of Vedii
b) make us stand out in an oversaturated market.
Final Logo
The negative space heart inside a “V” was an early brand component, and refined as we established the rest of the identity.
We settled on the orange colour palette as it represents warmth and passion, as well as setting us apart in an industry that largely uses blue (Match, OKCupid, etc), yellow (Bumble) and red (Tinder) as their main brand colour schemes.
Below is a showcase of the logo variations created for a variety of brand applications.
Final Wordmark
With a beautiful script font called Lust, Vedii’s wordmark is sophisticated and romantic, just like its intended user. While the application will primarily use sans-serif fonts for its interface, Lust provides a gorgeous typeface for eye-catching ads and social posts.
Social Media Identity
With a focus on fun, relatable content, and its diverse home-base of Vancouver, BC, Vedii’s socials were focused in on its target demographic: millennials and elder Gen-Z in the Greater Vancouver Area. With the sprinkling in of memes and inspirational quotes, Vedii’s instagram was the face of the app as we built out the app itself.
Application Design
With rigorous user testing, we created a functional app that flowed in a way that made sense to users trying it for the first time. Once we had the framework done, we had to also make it enticing and fun for users to interact with. Below is a flatlay of the overall look and feel of the application itself.
Conclusion
Although we ultimately did not continue pursuing Vedii due to financial constraints, the app had traction and interest from a variety of potential users as well as angel investors. We were successfully admitted into the SFU VentureLabs incubator, and were able to seriously pursue pitching and launching Vedii for a little over a year.
In short, the saturation of the market and the unfortunate timing (we began pitching this in 2020, at the height of COVID) damaged our ability to gain traction, and we ultimately decided to put shelve Vedii as we all pursued our own careers.