Tinder — Project Vinyl
I designed Tinder’s post-match music-sharing feature for playful interactions that help break the ice and make starting and kindling conversations easy and fun.
OVERVIEW
Tinder is the world’s most popular app for meeting new people that helps make the online dating experience simple, fun, and useful.
As a senior product designer, I’ve led the core features of Authentication, Account Creation, Profile, Swipe Experience, Post-match Chat, and special initiatives.
The chat experience is the catalyst to a real-world introduction for Tinder users, who want to connect with people in real life. Unlike other messaging apps, which are all about maintaining relationships, Tinder’s chat experience solely focuses on 1:1 interactions, so you can learn about your match and take the next steps to meet in person.
We can do this by facilitating lighthearted and playful interactions that help break the ice and make starting and kindling conversations easy and fun. Partnership with Spotify enabled us to launch a feature called Vinyl.
ROLE
Senior Product Designer
TIMELINE
Q4 2022 – H1 2023 (6 Weeks)
OUTCOMES
16M+ music messages sent in the first month
Conversation volume increased by 120%+ in the following quarter
Stale matches within the first 24 hrs of the match decreased by 8%+ in the following quarter
Introduced measuring contact info sharing event
LINKS
Context
Problem
The current landscape of Tinder is wildly successful with pre-match experience allowing users to match quickly with low cognitive load. On the other hand, the post-match experience has been long neglected. Strengthening the post-match experience will further enhance the overall satisfaction of the entire app.
Business Goals
This project wasn’t tied to any direct monetization strategy other than improving the broken experience for our users, but we believe enhancing the post-match chat experience will drive the overall engagement metrics which in turn can be leveraged for in-app purchases and in-app advertisement engagement.
Product Solution
Improve experience quality by providing more ways for users to express themselves and their creativity:
Vinyl feature with song clip sharing
Audio messages for international markets
Inline gifs and emoji suggestions
Creative Strategy
I began this project by first understanding the latest data on users’ chatting behaviors in their post-match chat. Success metrics are more nuanced when it comes to conversations, so I began formulating my metrics by gathering data from the user behavior patterns— Conversation is defined as 2 exchanges. The median Conversation length is 10 messages. The top 25% of conversation has 24 messages or more. The bottom 25% of conversations have 5 messages. Users are not using Tinder for ongoing conversation and based on these, we defined success as the following:
Conversation length and 2-way conversation coverage
Contact information exchange as a guide to success
A qualitative study to gain insights on success definition for users
Case study of products that go beyond contacts and help users with dating as well
Academic Research on Online Dating
Research
When I joined Tinder, we weren’t really focused on the entire match cycle since pre-match portion of Tinder was already really successful as you can imagine. Our attention was limited to investing in the winning features. So, I began building out user journey mapping for our full match cycle in order to understand the full picture of the user journey & look for new opportunity areas.
I moderated the session between designers, engineers, and the pms for the workshop. And as I started cross examining our findings with actual users I was talking to, I found discrepancy in the post match experience.
When I synthesized the findings, it was fairly consistent with legacy artifacts that there was no glaring problem.
But, when I looked closely at different durations of first time matches, I discovered that so many matches were silent after the first 24 hours.
There I found a pattern- no conversations present. We’ve been looking at the limited metrics, and it was eye opening to find 100% of matches with no conversation after the 24 hour mark went nowhere. It validated my assumption that:
“If someone doesn’t initiate conversation within 24 hrs of match, that match goes to the grave.”
This allowed me to redefine the problem statement more accurately & specifically:
“User match expires when they don’t exchange 2 or more chats within 24 hrs of match.”
I then turned my attention to conducting competitive analysis on ice-breaker games and team building activities. Main takeaway was that gaming was not a right fit mostly due to the limitation of mass appeal and artificial nature of ice breaker type games.
Creative Solution
What’s something that has broad, mass appeal to people that can also be personal? It became clear at this point music sharing is perfect for what we need.
I quickly built out an in-app game prototype to test it out on internal teams & actual users.
I also created an early prototype for music sharing and did an A/B test with the above ice-breaker game prototype.
The result was a resounding win for music sharing over the ice-breaker because participating test users found music sharing to be more relevant for their match. They also favored the freedom of control when sharing their favorite music.
My team already had a relationship with the Spotify team because of an earlier account integration project between Tinder & Spotify, so I began working closely with my partnership team.
Legal & leadership teams got attached at this point and we hammered out a partnership deal.
Next, I created a high-fidelity interactive prototype with the Principle App and continued to test with real users and internal teams to reflect their feedback.
Vinyl Music Sharing in Chat- General Flows
Vinyl is a new feature that lets Tinder users share music via Spotify in chats. We added a green icon in the chat, which allows users to look for songs they want to share with their matches. They can only share a 30-second clip—but that was enough to deliver the message.
Outcomes and Conclusion
Initially, we designed this feature to allow users to send any length of customized segments of songs so that they can custom create their message as well as take advantage of lyrics, but we pivoted into sending predetermined 30-second clips instead, due to financial constraints & lack of Spotify API offering.
Fun fact: Instagram leveraged its deep pocket by directly signing with record labels to allow users to use music freely in their app.
It’s currently live in the global iOS markets and you can enjoy sharing all the popular music clips currently available on Spotify. The initial first month of measuring the live user base showed low participation and we determined it was largely due to lack of marketing. I’ve coordinated with the CRM team to design the notification modals to educate & encourage users to engage with the new feature.
The numbers measured in 8 major international markets post 3 three-month periods revealed a significant lift in music exchange rates as well as a lift in conversation length and contact exchanges. We also measured qualitatively— Internal surveys through the in-app and email showed over 80% satisfaction rate.
Due to the large scope & impact of the project (Super Like paid consumable is directly responsible for Tinder monetization in the hundred millions of profits as well as its proximity to the main profile cards), my team has closely monitored every step of the launch plan to post mortem analysis. It currently lives globally and directly contributed to a 2% increase in Super Like consumable purchases.