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. Vedii was pitched as an application that matches you based on shared interests: Set a time and activity, and meet an interested person ASAP. Vedii was accepted into the SFU VentureLabs incubator, where we needed to create a high-fidelity prototype and demonstrate the financial viability of the application.
To do this, we needed to create an entire brand identity and fully designed application to pitch the app to potential investors and advertisers. We had already proven that users were interested in the product via a variety of Canada-wide surveys to address their pain points. Now we just had to sell investors and advertisers on it.
Client
Centre for Digital Media
SFU VentureLabs
Medium
iOS/Android app, built in Figma
Scope
User Research and Testing
Market Research
UI/UX Design
Figma Prototyping
Team
GigaPenguin Inc:
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
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.
Method:
Designing Vedii was an ongoing process focused mainly on the user experience both inside and outside the application, as well as its interface.
By examining our user research alongside our market research data, we ensured our idea was sound, and filled a gap that the market hadn’t addressed.
We had to curate the overall identity to make it welcoming, enticing, and an overall experience that users wanted to seek out. On top of that, we also had to make concessions for advertisements and how the application would generate revenue, which meant a lot of research into “freemium” models, sponsorships, and how we could potentially build ads into the application itself.
Design Process:
The design of Vedii was two-pronged: the first prong being the brand identity, the second the application itself. We tested both in tandem while running user tests, making sure the application was easy to navigate and also attractive to use.
I also expanded the brand further, focusing on social media presence, our web design, and the greater surrounding identity, so that Vedii was less of an application and more of an entire experience, the way many other successful dating apps brand themselves out.
The brand identity and the look and feel of the application were created in tandem, with our ongoing wireframes becoming progressively higher fidelity as the brand identity developed.
Brand Identity
Logo & Typeface
The negative space heart inside a “V” was an early brand component, and refined as we established the rest of the identity.
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.
Colour Scheme & Photography Style
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.
We also focused on high quality, slightly artistic stock imagery to use with the brand to promote our more refined approach to online dating. We also liked to use the V logo as a ‘knockout’ in the photos.
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.
I also created a variety of tongue-in-cheek illustrations that represented the brand well and were used in user-facing promotions as well as for pitches with potential investors.
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.
Results
We successfully built a high fidelity prototype of the application and had interest from software developers to build the app. We also had a tonne of interest from the public and many of our user testers. The buy-in was large, and we had an audience, both in person and online, through our social media and web presence. Unfortunately, Vedii was not financially viable, as we could not prove it would generate enough revenue in an oversaturated market, and we did not have the funding the interested developers were looking for. But the experience was invaluable nonetheless, and has informed much of how I currently operate my own freelance business.