Client: Krush
Team: Pete Wise, Sara Ma, Meng Shi, Jiyoung Lee, and Nabhi Shah
My Role: User Researcher and Client Facilitator
Duration: 6 weeks
The Challenge: How do we get more users to Krush?
Krush is a dating app designed specifically for Asians and Asian culture.
Krush is entering a growth stage, and wanted our help on attracting and maintaining new, authentic users. Stephen (our client and founder/CEO of Krush) narrowed down their referral system as a point to research and improve, since their current design was not getting enough usage. It is centered around in-app rewards, which both Stephen as well as our team thought to be uninspiring and not a strong enough incentive to get a user to refer someone.
Stephen was less interested in receiving physical designs from us, and was more interested in user insights as well as validated ideas. Thus, our deliverable goal was a research report deck that outlined new feature ideas with mid-fi prototypes, and the interview insights to back them.
Dating apps in general are going through a shift, with a lot of them pivoting their focus to creating more wholesome relationships – a purposeful move away from “swiping” culture.
Stephen strongly resonated with this movement, and wanted Krush to stand out as an authentic and engaging community for Asians and Asian Americans to find their match. We wanted to stay true to that, and kept that in mind throughout the entirety of the project.
What began as just just analyzing referrals eventually expanded into reframing the entire value positioning of Krush as a culturally specific dating app.
Who did we talk to?
Stephen wanted qualitative, fleshed out data from us, so we felt that user interviews were the best method to use. We conducted 15 total interviews, and to make sure that our participants were all in-market, they had to fit the following criteria:
- Single
- Dating/ has experience with dating apps
- Age 20-30
- Asian
We recruited all of these users through our own networks.
Methodology and Results
Based on the 6 week timeline for the project, we decided to split the interviews in to three iterative phases, each about 1.5 weeks long and consisting of 5 interviews.
This began with an intense and ongoing brainstorming session in Figjam, where we documented ideas as well as all of our rough notes for both features and interviews.
For the first two rounds of interviews, we narrowed down to 3 ideas social referral ideas to test, which we felt aligned with Stephen’s vision for Krush:
- Matchmaker: Ask your friends to recommend profiles for you, and if you match, both of you will be rewarded
- Tell a Krush: Send an anonymous message to your crush that they have an admirer, and must sign up on the app to learn more.
- Raffle/Events: Referring someone to Krush would allow you to win tangible rewards, such as event tickets.
We decided to test these prototypes alongside Krush’s existing referral flow, as this would help us gain insight in to whether a more social feature is viewed more positively than what exists (just in-app rewards). Specifically, we showed participants the existing flow first.
Validation, However…
This strategy proved insightful – 2/3 participants noted how it would feel strange to refer someone to a dating app, especially in such a formal manner.
Most notably, the first two rounds confirmed our suspicions that the current referral loop is dull and lackluster.
Matchmaker proved to have a lot of potential, but participants noted that they would need to feel more confident in the app if they were to refer a friend to use it.
Similarly, Tell a Krush was interesting and fresh for participants, but 2 specifically mentioned how they would not sign up for an unknown app like this, even if receiving the message was exciting.
87% of Participants felt that both Matchmaker and Tell and Krush were exciting and fresh.
However, we could tell that our participants were not completely sold on Krush as a desirable app overall, despite the fact that they were in-market and used other, similar dating apps. They lacked confidence in what it sets out to do, which is to create an authentic dating community for Asians.
Changing Course
This confusion from participants led us to our critical “Ah-Ha!” moment – Krush offers all the standard features of a dating app but does not highlight Asianess as a defining aspect of the experience.
A specific user quote was particularly helpful to us for realizing this:
“Is this really made for Asians?”
Referrals were ineffective not only because of the transactional and bland incentives, but because Krush did not adequately position itself as an Asian-centric app.
This moment marked a strong pivot in our research, where we decided to look beyond referrals and brainstorm ideas that could not only attract new users, but also emphasize Krush’s unique, Asian-centric community. We felt that this would not only strengthen the core value proposition of Krush, but it would also encourage the kinds of users that the client wanted to join their community.
Bringing Asian Identity to the Forefront
For our last round of interviews, we decided to test four new ideas for features that would both attract new users as well as emphasize Krush’s cultural identity:
- Community Feed: User generated content about Asian culture, which connects to a compatibility score.
- Daily Snap: A daily photo sharing challenge centered around Asian-culture prompts.
- Zodiac Compatibility: Matching users based on their Zodiac charts.
- Rating Profiles: Rating other profiles and only matching with profiles of certain scores.
These ideas all bring Asian identity to the forefront, while also utilizing some kind of social mechanism. Community Feed and Daily Snap scored the highest in our interviews, with 75% and 62% approval respectively.
We went back and forth as a team as to whether or not to do full-fleshed usability studies for each new idea, or simply just ask about perceptions. We felt that at the end of the day, the true value is in evaluating if Krush has a clear value proposition, rather than the specific UI, which can always come later.
We felt strong enough in the results from this round of interviews that this pivot was the right move, and that adding this layer to the project, and ultimately the deliverable, would be more valuable than just focusing on referrals. We let Stephen know that our research report is going to diverge from referrals and include more general themes of Krush, to which he seemed eager to hear about.
Delivery
Our final deliverable included the Matchmaker and Tell a Krush referral features, as well as the shift into the Community Feed and Daily Snap.
These ideas tested the strongest amongst interview participants, and helped address Stephen’s desires of attracting new, authentic users.
Our goal was to report our findings in a bottom-up manner: we started by sharing the problem with current referrals, as well as our recommendations to make them more social. Then, we led into our finding that Krush lacks cultural identity, which segued into the subsequent Community and Daily Snap ideas.
We chose to take this angle because of the nature of our results. Ultimately, we found an existing problem in Krush that we were not necessarily tasked with finding, but felt it was important enough to share. By leading into that insight, rather than starting with it, a more cohesive story could be told.
Stephen appreciated our report and mentioned that he particularly liked the Daily Snap feature, relating it to existing apps like BeReal. Additionally, he told us how our data about their value prop opened his eyes to how others perceive Krush, and it gave him a new perspective from which to move forward from. Personally, that was about the best response I could have hoped for. I wanted Stephen to understand how outside eyes perceive Krush, and I felt that we accomplished that.
Takeaways
Our professor Taylor Valore emphasized a key piece of advice that stuck with me for our project – our job as consultants is not to report what the client already knows, but to expand their horizons. We were extremely hesitant at first to pivot our research, but realized that sharing insights such as these is not only helpful, but also our responsibility. This advice helped us deliver a better result to our client, and is something that will stick with me as I move forward in my career.