Lead Designer | 2023 | Badoo (Bumble inc)
Highlights
6 Months | 2023
New features and redesign across whole of app
Women's experience team
Charged with improving retention and chats initiated
Skills
Iterative design for A/B tests
Workshop Facilitation
Stakeholder Management
Research
Badoo is a ten year old dating app which is part of Bumble Inc.
With 460 Million active users it is the third largest dating app in the world.
The vast majority of revenue and activity from Badoo comes from men. So being on the Women’s Experience team this does create business/user tension.
Our goal as the Women’s Experience team was to increase the number of yes votes, increase retention in day 1 and week 1, and improve women’s satisfaction in the product
(Note: women’s satisfaction was originally only measured through NPS, but our team pushed for in app surveys, post tests).
Project Impact
Positive Metrics
3-6% increase in number of quality chats
7% Increase in yes votes from women
30% more women paying for the app
Team Metrics
Highest shipping rate in the company
Highest cumulative impact
Most initiatives taken onto the company roadmap 23/24
As a new team we had to wait a month whilst our new PM’s visa got sorted and our devs joined the team, which gave the content designer, researcher and I time to gather some evidence whilst the rest of the team was decided.
We wanted to learn what were the main pain points for women's experience which from previous research we understood to be inappropriate messages, harassment and being overwhelmed by the volume of likes and messages.
What we did
Qualitative research.
12 user interviews with women.
10, 1 week long diary studies with 6 women, 3 men 1 non heterosexual individual.
Quantitive research and desk research.
BI data pulls and analysis.
Previous test findings and analysis.
Gather collaborators.
Being part of Bumble Inc I created a group with Bumble’s Women’s Experience team to share insights and initiatives.
Building a confidence roadmap
We had gathered enough evidence to build the foundations of our teams roadmap which we broke down for the business into four parts:
Must Fix
Areas that we felt were creating harm to the brand or our users.
Quick Wins
Areas which were low cost in terms of time and effort and would create impact.
Stategic solutions
Needed more discovery time but prioritised over the perceived benefit to both business and user.
Once these were all mapped we added a confidence level to each of these initiatives based on previous tests and experience.
Within 6 months we were the most productive team in Bumble inc, shipping multiple projects at a time from our list of Must Fix, Quick Wins and concepts for fundamental change.
Fundamental change project
Insight - Having lots of likes we saw flattered women at first, being liked is nice! But that quickly turned to being overwhelmed and worse still, increasing safety concerns.
Problem - a game implemented to choose chat requests for you makes it very hard to know exactly how many chat requests you have. Furthermore it actually shows and hides chats overtime, leading to an additional problem as some men pay to send chat requests to popular members.
Hypothesis - by collating all chat requests in one transparent area in a controlled way women will feel less confused with what a chat request is and what actions they can do.
Result - in dev.
Longer timescale projects
Insight - all users from the diary studies struggled to find how to edit their profile and how to filter their potential matches.
Hypothesis - by allowing users to edit their profile and get to filters easily we will have richer profiles (a user pain point) and enable users to narrow their search for relevant profiles more quickly (on first use location radius is set for whole country!).
Guardrails - this is the second largest revenue making area so all use cases had to ensure that the revenue team felt their revenue space was not infringed upon.
Result - in dev.
Having multi swim lanes and testing to learn has been the most productive way that I have worked.
By working on quick wins and fundamental change simultaneously, we have been able to avoid an unachievable backlog. Testing to learn across multiple areas of the app has enabled us to make evidence based contributions to the design system and highlight some of the discrepancies and malpractice that had been deprioritised historically.
Lessons Learned
Working holistically means working on peoples previous work. Including them and advocating for their good ideas leads to better relationships and traction.
You can have all the evidence in the world: demos, slick presentations, videos of users frustrations, the works. But sometimes it won't go your way. Accept it and move on to bigger and better things! Focus on the good achieved and hype your team up for what they’ve done!
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