Double the Fun
Double the Fun was a technology startup that aimed to make dating more fun and social.
Brief
I was hired by the founding team to develop the company's main product, a social dating site.
They'd identified a core market and had a vision for the product – my job was to develop the game mechanics, user experience, then lead development and launch of the product.
Approach
Immersion
I started by leading the team through a series of collaborative design sessions to immerse ourselves in the problem and pool our collective knowledge. It was here we were able to uncover a number of opportunities and challenges, identify user groups and develop the core character of the brand.
Product design
The basic premise of the product was that you and your friend could meet up with someone else and their friend. That created some interesting problems around friends, making plans and personal privacy, especially in 2008 when social networking was pretty new and people weren't used to sharing as much of themselves online.
As a consequence developing the game mechanics was pretty challenging, taking a number of iterations to get the right balance.
Build
Technical architecture
Once the game mechanics and user experience were figured out, I began designing the technical architecture of the site. Again, the social aspects of the site and privacy considerations added a great deal of complexity here too.
Development
I developed the product as an interactive AJAX application supported by a back-end architecture based on an MVC design pattern that was coded in PHP and built on top of a MySQL database.
I was also responsible for the front-end which used the JQuery library and plain CSS.