Have you ever searched for a date online? If so, you might have stumbled upon Sympatia.onet.pl. It's one of the largest dating websites in Poland with more than 4 million users.
Sympatia is available on desktop, mobile, Android, and iOS.
Since 2006 Sympatia has been a part of Onet.pl S.A. - one of the most recognizable media companies in Poland and the owner of: Onet.pl, zumi.pl, VOD.pl, Plejada.pl, Zapytaj.onet.pl, Skapiec.pl, NK.pl, and many other popular services.
Our goal was to increase engagement and number of interactions between Sympatia's users. In order to do that we came up with a simple yet proven idea of a dating game. Hot or not? When a user gets the same note from a person that he liked, bingo, we've got a match! That's the basic rule of playing Bingo! game.
Creating Bingo! seemed to be a piece of cake. However, I found many unexpected game flows which we had to secure before deployment. For example, what to do when a blocked user wants to play? Or should a user get a photo of a blacklisted person? Or what would he like to see when getting a match?
Some of the initial ideas needed adjustments during development phase. Some of them changed over time. Many concepts, iterations, paper wireframes, Axure mockups, A/B tests, real user testing and analyses allowed us to create a truly unique user experience of a match search.
One of the toughest decisions was to pick the right voting icons. Initially, we used 'decline', and 'heart' icon. During A/B tests, however, we noticed that users tend to give more votes when instead of 'heart' they get 'tick' icon. Probably, because of less serious emotional tone of the tick symbol in comparison with the heart.
Creating game entry treshold in a form of a required profile picture was a really good idea. Not only did we encourage users to play Bingo! but we also increased the number of added profile photos, and it seems like photos added by users started to be carefully picked in order to get higher match rate.
Final result? Higher user engagement, more messages exchanged between users, and more interest from Sympatia's partners when it comes to launching advertisement campaigns.
As for now, Bingo! is available on web and mobile.
