Dating apps need playfulness

Every day when I scroll my feed, I see a cool Gen-Z social app that's bold, soulful, and made by people who use it. And what I've come to realize is that none of them are about dating (remember, people used to do that back in the day, huh?). They're about sharing photos with friends, talking to strangers, meetups, but not two people awkwardly flirting to get to know each other better.

So I decided to prototype a small app to show how we can tastefully flirt online. All dating apps usually converge on having a long list of unread chats with stupid pickup lines (or worse), so I'm going to melt the ice a bit.

The caveat? Both people must look at the screen at the same time.

And have fun.

So let's get started.

How I met your mother. It started with a touch.

Constraining two people to look at the screen simultaneously opens up opportunities for new interactions, the simplest of which is a touch.

We may use this to send heart emojis to a person, even highlighting the exact word that we loved. A small circle appears right at the place where another person touched, making the whole interaction instantly more intimate.

We can go even further and fill another person's screen with heart emojis if we tap too many times.

Not Safe For Work 🌶️

Dating apps are perfect for experimenting with how we show NSFW pics. When your partner has explicitly allowed receiving NSFW messages in your chat, you may mark your photos as such and the person will see a cloud of particles first, until they're ready to reveal it.

The particles look like something we can wipe away, so let's try to do that.

probably, the interaction I'm most proud of.

With how over the top this interaction is, I think it may open the door to funny moments in chat. For example, you can package any harmless meme in an NSFW box and subvert the expectation, which can make a person laugh. And laughter is something that can melt the ice.

Let's draw together

Sometimes words are not enough to communicate, and in real life we do much more than just speak. One of the best ways to get to know a person is to work on something together. And one of the most fun and simple is to draw.

So imagine, you're in the chat and suddenly, you see a pulsating gradient on top of the screen that calls you in. A label appears and says your partner is drawing. When you open it, you see the person drawing in real time. The drawing is evaporating, so you've got to pay attention.

But that also means you can send messages this way too.

U still here??

All of this is based on the idea that the person is looking at the screen and sees the chat at the same time as you. So we need a mechanism to tell if someone is online and is here with you.

I believe there is no better way to show that a person is present than a label under their name or a border around their avatar.

Every time a person comes back to the chat, their avatar gets circled by a solid border. It disappears when they leave.

The next logical step would be to notify someone, inside or outside the app, when the other person wants to draw or play a game with them. Notifications were outside the scope of this prototype, but the best implementation I've seen was Honk.

Games, on the other hand...

Would you like to play a game? Tap me →

I've seen several trendy chat apps in which you can play games with your friend, but none of them were dating apps. Even though in real life, board games are used for this exact reason: to befriend strangers and make people less nervous.

Here I'm going to show an example of how that can look and feel. I made a card game where you have to answer the question with emojis. The purpose of the game is to find where you match with a partner even before writing a single message to them.

Even though they are lightweight, games must feel like games: quirky, fun, surprising.

Emoji selection must be fun too.

In this card game, gameplay works like this: you answer how you feel about the topic in question and wait for the other person to answer. When they do, you see how they feel about it and the card switches.

If you both answer with the exact same emoji, your screen background fills with emojis and you have a match.

What's the point?

There is a lot of talk about how writing software is cheap and easy to do now. But if that's true, we must demand more from it. We can get software that feels alive, instant, playful. Software that evokes emotions. Not simply because we can. But because people who use it will love it.

And I think it matters.