Dearly Dating App
Dearly is a dating and community-building app for senior citizens that implements accessibility features to give our seniors a chance to independently use the app to find friends, life partners, and community.
This project was a collaboration with Abby Sheets, Athena Rondeau, and Pearl McNames.
We all contributed to the online research, testing, and organizing but had different screens we were in charge of fleshing out.
Prototype
Most of my user tests looked something like this.
After conducting our research into the subject and testing out other dating apps, we went and talked to actual single seniors to ask them about their experiences and what they would want to see on an app like this. Several women said they are widowed or divorced and are happy being single. They just want companionship.
This gave me the idea to expand the app to not only find romantic partners, but platonic ones too. The team thought this was a great idea and with that, we went to work on a prototype, starting with this site map.
The first part of our research was creating a persona to test the senior dating apps already on the market.
My persona was a 71-year-old gay widower. When we tested out the other senior dating apps, most of them did not have the option to find same-sex partners.
Research
We each picked several screens to sketch out variations of, like these profile screens I drew. We then got opinions from our classmates and professor or which they liked best.