MatchFamilies

MatchFamilies was an app where families could find everything they needed: from friends and social connections with the same interests and within the same demographic, to tips on family-friendly places and recommendations of doctors.

My role in this project evolved while I was involved with it. I started out as an external advisor. Thus, I went through the existing and already launched app, focused on the user experience, and concluded that to prevent users from abandoning the registration process we should focus on a better UX writing. So I worked on improving those texts by making them useful, clear, and human. I also gave some feedback regarding the UX design, for example the IA or how certain actions buttons, and feedback of the app didn’t align with industry standards and thus with the user expectations. I also worked on proofreading other texts on the website.

However, I quickly became a more permanent part of the team, because the owner of the app decided that I could do much more. That is why I decided to go back to the basics and do user interviews to try to discover what was working, what wasn’t working, and why users failed to finish the registration process. I decided to go back and talk to the users because this hadn't been done before during the development of the app and I considered the user input, beyond some informal conversations, essential. That research helped us come up with a design solution that encouraged users to complete the registration process and fill in their profiles in an honest way.

Working at MatchFamilies was a big challenge for me because I ended up being the head of user experience (and the only UX designer and writer) while still learning about UX and trying to advocate for the users while being conscious of the budget constraints. I also had to learn to deal with different stakeholders (the owner, developers, and marketing person) in a remote team that has been working together from the beginning. My coming into the project when it had already started and many decisions had been made was, ultimately, one of the biggest challenges for me.

After 4.5 years, MatchFamilies isn’t being updated anymore. However, you can check out the analysis document that I initially wrote for them and you can also check out the MatchFamilies website.