TL;DR: Kobble is a pre-launch dating app for Tier 1 urban India, where I’m a founding product design consultant. I derive feature specs and UX from observation and first-principles reasoning, and do the visual design. Being pre-launch, much of my work is under wraps.
Apps don’t know you
Likes don’t tell you why
There’s no post-match support
For representation only: line widths show the shape of the problem, not measured data.
The screens are under wraps, so they’re drawn here as wireframes.
Problem
Women get flooded with likes and can’t tell who’s worth answering
Question
How might a like tell her why someone is interested?
Solution
Widgets and the Grid Profile
A Grid Profile is built from widgets. Some are read-only, like photos and text; the rest ask whoever is viewing a question, such as a this-or-that or a red flag / green flag card. Answering one is how you show interest: the question tells you something about the owner, and your answer tells them something about you. This replaced like and dislike with interaction (“I want to know more about you”) and dismissal (“you are not my type”). Every like arrives with its answers, and the owner can filter the likes they’ve received by them, so a few shared opinions, not a photo, decide who’s worth replying to.
A profile to judge, then one tap either way. The like says nothing about why.
Interest is an answer, so it always arrives with a reason.
In the closed test, people averaged about 40 of these small interactions a day across the app.
Problem
After the match, chats stall and die
Question
How might the app carry two people from a match to a date?
Solution
The Matched Dashboard
Most apps treat a match as the end of their job and hand two people an empty chat, which is where ghosting, one person being too forward and conversations that never start all happen. The Matched Dashboard is a shared space for the two of them, with games and activities that give them something to talk about, so the chat works toward meeting in person rather than drifting. When either is ready, they press a private Ready to Meet switch, which tells neither of them until both have pressed it.
The app’s job ends at the match. Two people are left to start a conversation from nothing.
Something to do together, working toward meeting in person.
32 → 900 users in two weeks
In a closed test on the iOS app, all by word of mouth.
~40 interactions per user per day
People kept using the small taps.
Over 75% of men got a match
And every woman in the test did.
Status Pre-launch · much of it under wraps, so ask me for more
