A BETTER DATING EXPERIENCE
When I initially met the Dashing Date team, they organized in-person speed dating events exclusively. They had a good understanding of how the services provided differed from other companies that offered similar events, but they needed to better expose the brand and refresh their digital presence.
We held brainstorming meetings to imagine new messaging, approaches and tools that had the potential to shift the potential user's perception of speed dating events. These meetings enabled a long-term collaboration where I acted as a digital partner, overseeing all user-facing communication materials, website content integration and the transition of a content-only site to a more complex digital product with a user-centric design at the core.
USER-CENTRIC PRODUCT DESIGN
By analyzing business processes, I helped the team streamline the event-organizing operations by developing back-end tools and site integrations that improved the pre-event and post-event client experience:
- Integrated online ticket purchasing to eliminate third-party payment processing fees and the platform redirection from one site to another. This also allowed to gain control over the content, layout and presentation of all related communications, simplifying the delivering of event-related information to clients and reducing the number of emails they received.
- Created and integrated a data system for capturing and storing speed dating event matches to reduce the client post-event waiting time from 24 hours to 1 hour. This allowed clients to receive matches shortly after the events, instead of waiting until the next day for the event team to finish manually processing paper-based match data and generate dozens of individual communications.
The result of this feature was a dramatically improved the user experience that greatly reduced the user's anxiety potential of knowing whether or not positive connections were made during the event.
- Expanded the match system with additional logic and user-facing interfaces to eliminate the need for staff input by allowing direct digital user-input after the events. To manage this aspect, supporting back-end dashboards were created for the internal team, to be able to confirm, add or modify user-entered data.
DIGITAL STRATEGY
I consulted on and then developed a digital strategy that allowed for the creation and management of online-only events, as a complement to in-person events, but also driven by the in-person experience the client base was used to. This included rapid-prototyping of layouts and user interfaces and rapid-testing of innovative usability features.
As a long-term strategy, I consulted on the migration of the matches data system to a more future-proof and platform-independent environment and technology stack.
Website layout screenshots