Clara
Clara is an app that helps users dedicate time to dating, reflect honestly on their dates, and plan their next steps accordingly. It is the first ever gamified relationship management tool that takes the anxiety and weight out of modern dating.
Project Goals and Timeline
Duration:
May-August 2023
Responsibility:
UX Designer on MVP Concept (completed all production work)
I worked under the direction of Sarah Jutras from Huzzah Studio as a freelance UX designer, along with a product manager from The Product Consult, and founder, Jillian Romero Chaves, to get Clara’s MVP completed.
Wireframing (high-fidelity)
Collaboration with development team, company founder, senior designer and product manager.
Creation of marketing materials for the app store and for investor presentations.
Handing off a final UI kit for future designs.
This project contained both web and iOS designs for Clara (the dating app) and for Clara Open (the matchmaker experience). One of the biggest challenges, like with any MVP, was trying to fit as many key features into initial launch as possible.
Understanding Clara’s User Base
In order to understand Clara’s user-base, the founder of Clara worked hard to understand the pain points of both matchmakers and single men and women and relay the information in our regular meetings. The single men and women she spoke to discussed similar concerns which included:
Falling into patterns of dating and not seeing results
Wondering what they were doing right and where they were falling short
Trying to figure out where to go/what to do to find the right partner.
Matchmakers also provided their own pain-point. Often matchmakers make connections just within their own network, and not everyone is in the know about their services. They wanted ideally to use Clara as a way to find people outside their network both for matches and for business.
A more focused and intentional profile — the Clara Card
When a user is completing their profile, in addition to asking about their basic information and interests like in other dating profiles, I updated the onboarding flow to also ask about values, interests and other attributes they want to see in a partner to help guide their dating reflection process when they are journaling.
In addition to making the profile creation more intentional, I also added in a QR code for their shareable profile, or Clara Card. The Clara card allows them to share a QR code instead of a link if they want to pass along their information to a potential partner.
Logging and keeping up with prospects
In the founder’s calls and conversations with users, she found that often it was tough to keep up with information about initial dates, so being able to log prospects and assign statuses helps to capture user’s feelings in the moment.
We made the decision unfortunately to cut the dating insights section and save it for another release, but the goal of it was to provide insight into favorite date locations, best sources of prospects and basically at a high level, how dating is going. We hope to revisit this once the founder gets more feedback overall.
Intentional journaling after each date.
From our founder’s user calls, she also gathered that often people reported swiping and responding to the same “type of person” and continuing to go on dates even if they might not be feeling it. Intentional journaling helps provide space for users to reflect on their dating experience and truly evaluate whether this person has the attributes and values that a user is looking for. Before going into dates, we also have a “Dating Intentions” section where they can evaluate what they want out of a relationship before starting to log about specific individuals.
We created an “alignment check” that a user also would be able to complete after 5 dates to reflect in more depth, but this was reserved for a later release. The screens to the right reflect parts of the current intentional journaling process.
Clara Open MVP
Part of Clara’s MVP was to design a database for matchmaker partners. Clara users who would like their profile to be visible to matchmaker partners could opt-in and their profile would be searchable. The MVP included the registration flow, database, individual profile pages, and a request for appointment.
Currently, the request would get sent from Clara to the individual directly, but a future update would include a mailbox that they could send and receive messages through.
Final designs included a completed basic design system for the MVP that could be usable in the future. Here are some examples of components. They were used for both Clara and Clara Open.
Design System
Final designs included a completed UI Kit (examples below) that I updated with my designs, marketing materials for investor presentations, Google Play and the App Store, and finished MVPs for both Clara and Clara Open.
Final Designs
Reflection
It was awesome getting to work on an MVP product with the Clara team, I think even with the challenges of trying to fit everything into an initial product and develop in time for launch, we got the main features out. Some areas that we’d like to develop more for the future is the Matchmaker Experience overall, and this alignment check section I have featured here, where users can see their dating intention answers while they are journaling. These are all future iteration ideas though. Looking forward to continued work on Clara again sometime 🩷