Lively
Creative Direction • Branding • UI • UX • Mobile design • Website design • Visual Design • Content Strategy • Motion & Prototyping • Live Events
Lively is a stories-based dating app that allows you to see who someone really is outside of a typical dating profile.
Stories go far beyond static imagery and long text profiles to provide a more genuine glimpse into someone’s life and interests. Browse stories from people in your area and let them know if you’re interested. If they like you back, it’s a match and you’ll be able to chat.
Lively has been featured on TechCrunch, Bustle, Adweek, AskMen, and Elite Daily.
Home — Match screen
Eliminate common pain-points for online dating users
Create a "yes"/"no" paradigm that is unique to the app, online dating space, and video content
Present matches to the user in a way that is more personal, intimate, and dynamic than standard photo galleries
Lively is the antithesis to the abundant "gamification" of online dating.
A common pain point for female daters is swiping right as an action for saying "yes" to a match. Many men systematically swipe right on every woman without giving thought to more than one photo, giving themselves a higher chance of getting a connection.
However, this is frustrating for women because conversations occur at a low rate and the depth is typically shallow. Apps like Tinder—with unlimited matches and sparse, "superficial" information—promote this heavily, and the experience is lacking for people wishing to make a deeper connection.
Lively solved this problem by eliminating swipe altogether and limiting the number of matches users get per day. Both of these concepts, combined with the "story" (slideshow) structure of video and photo, gives the user a more immersive and authentic experience, leading them to make a more educated and considered decision about whom they are attracted.
Profile
Create a visually immersive and intimate experience to showcase user content
Allow users to show many sides to their personality and who they are
Eliminate common pain points in profile consumption
Make the experience of browsing user content easier
Limit text and basic information to amount most desired and useful to demographic
Most online dating platforms limit user photos to six, maximum. Photos are sometimes of poor quality, or only contain selfies, headshots, and the ubiquitous group photo. This, combined with limited written text, can paint a vague picture of who someone is.
Even if the platform does give the user the ability to write a lot, it can often be overwhelming and cause fatigue with the amount of work it takes to both write and read. Words can also be embellished, and peoples' views of themselves are often skewed from what they really are like.
With Lively, the ability to view "stories" containing both photo and video give users a very broad and intimate look into who someone really is. Users can have up to four stories, each containing up to 10-15 pieces of media. Users are not just forced into uploading selfies, but can also showcase hobbies and interests of theirs. When you see someone laugh in a video, or see how they dance or play their guitar, you better understand how the really are as a person, and feel a deeper connection to them, prompting connecting, chat, and ultimately meeting in real life.
Story creation & editing
Make it easy for the user to select a high-quality profile photo
Give the user a wide range of content sources
Give the user basic customization options
Create intuitive video and photo editing capabilities
There two common pain-points for photo selection in online dating: users either don't know what a good profile photo is or pick one that does not prominently feature them, and the sources for uploading photos is limited. Lively solves both of these problems in a number of ways.
The story creation process is broken up into two steps for optimal creation. First, users select their profile photo/avatar. When selecting a profile photo, we use facial recognition technology to pull directly from the users' Facebook profile photos and photos tagged of them. This way, we give the user a more refined selection of their best photos, making the often stressful process more comfortable and easy.
The second step is creating a story. After conducting research and user testing on millenial social media habits and the limits of other dating apps, we knew Lively had to give users options to access their best content. Most other apps only let users use photos from Facebook, which for many millenials is an outdated platform. Instagram is a much more abundantly used application, and it offers photos and videos of all aspects of a person's day to day life, including interests and activities. Furthermore, also letting users access their own photo library on their phone gives them even more options, as people typically have the most video and photo content stored there.
As one of the only dating apps to allow full access of the top forms of content, users can better curate their stories to be most true to themselves, resulting in more genuine and intimate profiles.
This feature gives people the ability to input their preferences for types of food they like to eat, their dietary restrictions, and any allergies or things they would like to avoid. This not only guarantees that the options offered will suit their preferences, but educates the user in the intelligence of EAT Club, and how it’s personalized just for you. (These cards can also be re-used in first-time user on-boarding, so the first menu they see is suited to their liking).
Messages & Chat
Organize messages in a way that is easy for consumption and creation
Help facilitate better connections and deeper conversations
The goal of the Lively Messages interface is primarily to aid users in better distinguishing and keeping track of who they are already chatting with and new connections. The inbox is organized in a way where new people they have never spoken to are at the top, and conversations that have had are stored at the bottom in order of most recent. Having this filtering system promotes more conversations and a much less frustrating experience than most other dating apps, which contain never-ending lists of both new connections and chat exchanges.
It can often be difficult to know how to start a conversation with someone. Typically, initiations can be shallow with minimal thought, and can be frustrating for users when they only scratch the surface and then ultimately fizzle out. If a user does want to dive a bit further and initiate a conversation based on something in the user's profile, they have to navigate back and forth from the profile and the chat screen, which can be a taxing interaction. Lively tried to solve both of these problems by playing the user story in the background of the chat screen prior to the first message being exchanged. Users can get a better idea of how to start a conversation, and content of stories depicting hobbies and interests ultimately lead to deeper, more fulfilling conversations between users.
