Lead Designer | 2024 | Bumble

When the risk of widely releasing an MVP doesn't pay off.

Problem to solve: Bumble very publicly announced a rebrand and a new feature, Opening Moves. However, the new feature wasn't meeting users' expectations, and usage rapidly declined.

Highlights

4 Months | 2023

Iterate on a feature + add new elements

Chat Team

Charged with improving Good chats, Chats initiated and reply rates

Skills

Stakeholder management

Workshop facilitation

Iterative design

Research

Collective Project Impact

Positive metrics

40% increase in Adoption

Positive metrics

5% increase in Good chats

Positive outcome

Risk minimised greatly by adding a review flow

Context

At the start of 2024 Bumble released Opening Moves. The feature was designed to alleviate the pressure on women to always have to make the first move after matching, whilst still maintaining their control. This was a huge move for Bumble, away from "Women make the first move" to "Make the next move." However, the mechanics of the feature and how it was messaged were confusing to users.

At the start of 2024 Bumble released Opening moves a feature designed to alleviate the pressure from women always making the first move after matching whilst still giving them control. This was a huge move for Bumble but it was released in a confusing messaging and a big rebrand which did not meet peoples expetations when using the product

At the same time, Bumble made 40% of its tech force redundant. As the new Connect team who, bar 2 engineers, had never worked on chat before, we needed to get up to speed quickly and deliver.

Mechanism for the old design

Users can add their own Opening move or a prewritten one.
Men, Women and Non binary people all had different experiences replying to an Opening Move.
No moderation for any free text, creating great risk to users.

Research

64% of current users feel that Opening moves made no difference to their experience because:

Woman's Feedback

"I’m still starting 98% of the conversations. It’s frustrating because when I have an opening move I actually want it to be answered but it’s completely forgotten"

Man's feedback

"I set an opening move and none of my matches acknowledge it... Most people don’t respond to them. They just start the conversation with ‘hi’ and completely ignores my opening move."

Woman's feedback

"I feel that asking the same question to multiple women did not garner many responses due to it being disingenuous. We are already living in the guise of anonymity in the dating apps. Having fake conversation starters only makes the situation worse."

30% of non adopters didn't use the feature because they didn't understand it.

Based on a large scale post MVP survey

Iterations

Allow

Multiple Opening moves and Image Opening moves

Enable

Enabling both men and women to reply to Opening Moves

Protect

Working with the safety team and legal we created a review flow with high and low thresholds for images and free text.

In addition to these screens we created more Educational touch points in the journey to help people understand Opening Moves and be able to create them.

The results

Opening moves adoption increased by 40%. We are now working towards increasing the good chat stat higher than the 5% increase by A/B testing different content for captions. We are also rolling out a number of other tests to constantly improve the concept.

Lessons Learned

Patience is key

When working on this project, it was easy to spot changes that needed to be made. However, as a new team, devs needed time to work out the tech space. I created a design backlog in Figma which meant, working with the devs, we were able to efficiently scope each project and then prioritise with our PM.

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Contact

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