HeartStrings
UX/UI, Dark Patterns, Figma, User Interviews
Designing a deceptive app experience that emotionally connects, engages users, and drives lasting brand loyalty.
Overview
Heartstrings is a dating app concept designed from a UI design challenge of creating a stealthy interface that prompts users to spend money frivolously. It's a swipe-based dating app with a marketing claim of finding "real connections", by blurring the faces of your potential dating partners. By leveraging UX design principles and strategies, this project investigates user behavior and UI ploys to develop a deceptive and addictive user experience. Heartstrings is an online dating app designed to capitalize on the modern dating dilemma while leveraging manipulative UX patterns to acquire revenue under the guise of promoting meaningful “blind” relationships.
THE PROBLEM
How might we design an app experience that drives profitability and builds trust through communicative branding to maintain user engagement?
PROCESS BREAKDOWN
Research
What problem can we target?
Nearly half of Americans agree that dating is harder now than it was 10 years ago.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS How do users do it?
As of December 2024, major platforms like Tinder and Bumble have experienced declines in user engagement and revenue.
Blind/low vision users commonly skim web forms first, so they expect the important information to be readily available, and would benefit from the option to skip to content.
USER RESEARCH How is it working now?
We discovered that the majority of users on leading dating apps like Tinder are from the ages 18-29.
From further analysis, we found the following consistencies among the young adults who use dating apps:
Analyze
USER PERSONAS
Based on our interviews, we created a typical user to Heartstrings to keep in mind in our design process.
FEATURE IDEATION
Then, drawing from their needs and frustrations, our team found four key functionalities to support low-vision users and provide an engaging navigation through the data analysis process:
Design
With the features in mind, I sketched out the layouts with our features before jumping into high-fidelity designs. To accommodate attention spans, we significantly reduced large blocks of text. These initial sketches were then transferred into navigable prototypes to move onto testing.
Current Site
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Lofi Designs
Test
We tested our final UI navigation with 4 users. These were the following results:
Progress Completion Bar
The progress bar appeared as a typical navigation element, causing 75% of users to feel disconnected and unmotivated to complete all three audio clips. I redesigned the progress bar into a streamlined arrow navigation with contrasting colors to indicate progress and increase engagement.
Accessibility Buttons
Users initially overlooked the interactive functionality of accessibility buttons. To make them more noticeable, I rounded the buttons and matched them to the other interactive buttons on the site.
Content Layout
70% of users either misclicked or didn't notice the Google survey hyperlink before the audio clip. Since listening to the audio clip is the intended first step, we made the survey link into a huge button instead, and placed it after the audio player.
Audio Player Design
Users took, on average, 12 seconds longer to engage with the audio clip when it was customized, compared to the unstyled version. While we had the audio players custom designed originally, we decided to leave them unmodified to avoid confusion and an unnecessary learning curve. The default player provided a more intuitive and faster interaction.
5. Final
RESULTS
We tested our final UI navigation with 7 users. These were the following results:
REFLECTION
This project was such an interesting experience—it really pushed me to get creative with app concepts while also thinking deeply about the ethics behind design choices. I wanted to find a balance between encouraging users to spend money and avoiding anything that felt manipulative or overly pushy. If I had more time, I’d love to explore how to create those little nudges that drive engagement and revenue without crossing the line into deceptive exploitation.
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