Nowadays, anyone can register a new domain name & use it to create an online dating website. However, simply being able to create an online platform isn’t enough, especially if you’re planning on providing matchmaking services: you must attract and retain users as well! Throughout this short article, we’ll go over some IxD, UI, and UX design ideas that you’ll want to consider before launching your new online service.
Your Design Must Represent Your Purpose
The design of your website (specifically the landing page) plays a big role in the retention of first-time visitors. If your landing page overwhelms visitors with a plethora of extraneous information, most of them will quickly become uninterested and move on to a different website. For this reason, you want to not only minimize the text on your landing page but also make sure the design clearly represents the website’s purpose.
Here’s an example: let’s say you’re making a tender dating site for casual or serious relationships. First-time visitors will likely understand the purpose of a if you have text that clearly states that it suits for seeking online hookups with tender singles. You can drive this point home using a background image of an attractive single who’s ready for tender dating. However, it’s important to avoid making your site look like a cookie-cutter website. When designing your dating website, it’s fine to take inspiration from your competition, but don’t stop there. Instead, build upon and revise their subpar design(s) into something that’s sure to make first-time visitors want to join your website.
Choose a “Friendly” Color Scheme
Implementing a site-wide color scheme may be an easy or complex process, depending on how you’re building the site. For this example, we’ll assume that you’re . There are many different themes available, but by using one as-is, you’ll essentially be ensuring that your site looks nearly identical to many others online: no good! While it’s perfectly fine to use a pre-designed theme for your website, you should modify the color scheme used to help your website stand out among the competition. It is recommended to use warm tones such as orange or red to help invoke feelings of passion in your site viewers. Feel free to experiment using different shades until you find a color combination that suits your website.
Focus On Simplicity
Alternatively, try limiting each page to performing a single action. This practice applies to both mobile and desktop services, but it’s especially important for mobile services, where available screen space is severely limited. Utilizing a simple design will help avoid overwhelming your users, making them more likely to perform actions as directed. These actions could be signing up for your dating chat website, responding to a chat message, or checking for a new match.
That said, it’s important to also . While pop-ups certainly fit within the “single action per page” mindset, they’re also invasive and interrupt whatever activity the user is doing, which is sure to annoy them. Repeat this process enough times, and they’re sure to change platforms, hurting your overall user base retainment. Instead, utilize notifications or small pop-ups that don’t obscure the entire screen. This will keep users up-to-date on site activities without disrupting their site usage.
Provide a Superior Messaging Experience
The main reason why people use dating sites is to form connections with other people over the internet. While it’s obvious that you must provide a superior messaging experience if you want to retain users, how exactly to go about this is where many websites fail. If the messaging on a dedicated site is inferior, users may stop using the site in hopes of having better luck on other dating apps. Let’s take a look at the main features you’ll want to make sure to include in your messaging system.
- Chat Bar – Having a chat bar is essential to any desktop website. Users don’t want to be limited to messaging on a specific page: they want to receive messages no matter where they are on the website! Fortunately, expectations are quite low in this regard so a standard chat bar that supports multiple conversations should be sufficient.
- Private Messaging – While having a public chat room can be helpful, you’ll need to offer private messaging if you want users to be able to form meaningful connections. While the ability to directly message someone is helpful, we recommend taking things one step further by allowing users to send time-sensitive messages. Once these messages are opened (after a set amount of time), they will be automatically deleted. This increases the likelihood of people using your site since they will be less wary of sharing private information.
- Photo & Video Messaging – At a bare minimum, your chat system should allow users to share images and videos with each other. The system should be capable of uploading user-generated videos to the chat log, but it should also be able to send Youtube (and other popular video hosting websites) videos as well. If users can view the videos from the chat bar, even better: this prevents them from navigating off of your website!
- Emojis – These fun little icons are easy to implement. However, failing to implement them will have drastic consequences for your website since modern internet users have gotten used to using them to convey their emotions. Offering standard is fine, but offering site-specific ones will provide a superior user experience.
- Live Video Calling – Although not a necessity, the ability to call another user via the “live video call” feature adds a lot of value to your website. While it may be unrealistic to attempt implementing this at the launch of your website, you should definitely plan on releasing this feature as soon as possible.
Consider “Gamification”
If you’ve read this far, congratulations: you now know the minimal requirements to keep in mind when designing your new web service! However, there’s one point we haven’t touched upon yet. The point? Gamification. The ideology behind is to reward users for interacting with the website, thereby turning the entire experience into an addicting game. Exactly how you choose to implement this is up to you, but remember: efficient originality breeds success. Good luck!