Introduction
ONA Dating
Americans spend over 2.1 billion USD and 30 hours a month using algorithms to find their perfect match. 90% out of US’s 54 million singles have tried online dating and one third of them haven’t even gone on a date with someone they met online. Few major reasons behind this are lack of proper dating advice and absence of a concrete mechanism to tackle criminal verification of users. ONA wanted to start a counterculture of algorithmic dating era. They wanted Simform to build a dating cum coaching platform where users are coached, advised and manually matched to genuine users, thus increasing the chance of converting date into long term relationships and not to mention, it ensures the security of the application users too.
Need for a human touch in dating app
Co-founder of Ona reached out to us for building dating cum coaching platform, after getting inspiration from the experience of date-coaching his brother who was struggling with different dating apps. Our engagement started with a clickable prototype built on Invision to get quick initial feedback from real users that not only includes daters but also dating experts and coaches. Our product design team were able to deliver prototype in less than a month of time which really helped Ona team to come up with better ideas and build product as per end user’s expectations.
Smarter Dating for Smarter Generation
The final product was developed as a native iOS application using swift. We implemented customer focused onboarding processes that helps them reach the “aha” moment ASAP. By testing and validation of our user flows, we were able to successfully build a community driven customer experience that contains – Voice and Video communication, in-app blogs, embedded content, content tagging and chat facility.
With a well planned marketing campaign focused around the launch of ONA, the application was able to get thousands of users easily. The user experience reduced churn, and boosted network effects for organic user acquisition. ONA was later covered by all major technology publications like TechCrunch, TNW, CNET, to name a few.
Two Sided Marketplace for dating
ONA is two sided marketplace for singles who are looking for a real relationship and dating experts who can give dating advice. We can consider this as two different apps with different onboarding steps, features and purposes. User can read dating advice by different specialist and even hire one, via in-app payment. Dating experts provide ‘Consulting’ services to the singles, based on the requirement. While designing the app, we focused on splendid user experience. We added image size criteria for image delivery and APNGs for animation, which boosted the performance of the application.
Video calling for private dating consultation
One of the key features of ONA is video and voice calling experience where dater can have private one on one session with dating expert.
Video and voice calling requires expertise in session creation, tackling with reconnecting due to network issues, storing call recording on server, audio and video quality fluctuation, latency in delivering the audio, etc.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, we decided to go for Programmable voice and video by Twilio which is build on top of WebRTC.
It allowed us to build and scale a reliable, high quality video experience without worrying about hosting, storage or scalability.
Video and voice calling requires expertise in session creation, tackling with reconnecting due to network issues, storing call recording on server, audio and video quality fluctuation, latency in delivering the audio, etc.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, we decided to go for Programmable voice and video by Twilio which is build on top of WebRTC.
It allowed us to build and scale a reliable, high quality video experience without worrying about hosting, storage or scalability.
Flexible Architecture for Scalability and app performance
With well planned marketing activities by Client at the time of launch, we anticipated the sudden increase in user base. We wanted our backend architecture and cloud server to efficiently handle this load. We implemented async data transfer from mobile to cloud using high performing Node.js framework. The scalability of read-write operations was further enhanced by MongoDB. We also made sure that we seamlessly distribute incoming application traffic to multiple EC2 instances with the help of AWS Elastic load balancer to avoid any server downtime.