Enriching the experience for Muslims seeking partnership

Project Overview

For practicing Muslims in the United States, many share the dream of spending their happily ever after with a spouse. Dating apps aimed at connecting Muslims with one another exist in the online landscape but have proven challenging for its users who seek more serious and long term partnerships or marriages.

Role

User Research, Information Architecture, Interaction design, UI design, Prototyping & Testing

Research

In order to better understand Muslim dating apps and the challenges users face, I identified the following research methods to better understand the problem.

• Secondary research

• User interviews

• Competitive analysis

This project began with a questionnaire sent to the founder of Love, Inshallah to better understand the goal of Love, Inshallah. In addition to that, I conducted a competitive analysis to understand what dating apps exist in the market, ones that were targeted towards Muslims and others that were not. With this research, I began to understand that there are a variety of dating apps in the market. However, all of these apps rely on swiping left and right and the struggles of choice fatigue, ghosting and feelings of exhaustion remain constant across these apps.

Understanding the user

Muslim users on dating apps all have different goals, some are seeking short term relationships, long term partnerships, some have undefined goals and others are looking for marriage. There is a wide range of goals, but the main end goal of many Muslim-centric dating apps seems to be marriage.

For those seeking marriage, the blueprint to get there varies per person. As Muslims are a religious minority, many Muslim users seek dating apps to connect with Muslims within their area or across the United States. In some instances, they can be connected to users in different countries. The capabilities widens the pool of potential matches but it still puts the onus on the user to sort through all of tens or hundreds of matches.

I wanted to conduct a survey with Muslim users who use dating apps and are seeking marriage. I wanted to understand what their successes and challenges were with online dating. I wanted to also understand if their cultural or religious background influenced their dating practice, if at all? I also wanted to understand why these users tend to resort to an online dating app rather than a matchmaking service.

User survey

20 participants who currently use or have used dating apps took part in our survey. The participants were asked about their perspective on dating apps, their challenges and their emotions while using Muslim dating apps.

The key findings for the survey included:

• 90% of users generally dislike dating apps. Users describe that they feel hopeless and bored using dating apps.

• Users feel their matches are misrepresenting themselves. There is a feeling that people are not being their authentic selves online and dating intentions are unclear.

• Users have certain needs that would allow them to feel safe in the online dating process. Users would like good communication, mutual connections, references, and/or meeting in public before they meet their matches in person.

• Users feel that a matchmaker would have a smaller pool than a dating app. It is known that dating apps attract more men than women, which is favorable for women seeking male spouses/partnerships. However, matchmaking services seem to attract more women than men, which makes the dating pool smaller for women seeking male spouses.
  
  

Persona

Interviews with the matchmaker/founder of Love, Inshallah, the survey and market research influenced the making of this persona. The persona is in her 20s and uses Muslim dating apps with the goal to get married. This persona is looking for matches within her area and would prefer to not have a long distance relationship. She struggles to keep up with a high volume of messages on these apps and does not respond to many of her matches.

Competitive analysis

To further analyze the market, I researched two leading Muslim dating apps - Salams and Muzz. These dating apps have very similar branding and goals. They tend to attract young Muslims, a majority in their mid 20s to mid 30s. Muzz seems to attract a more global audience while Salams attracts more users across the United States.

The UI of these apps is also very similar as they contain swiping as a main way to sort through potential matches. Salams has a religiosity spectrum where users can gauge how religious they are and an optional marital timing tool. Muzz allows users to add a chaperone to a chat between two matches to ensure an extra layer of safety.

Generally speaking, users feel that their matches on Salams are not seeking marriage and only want short term partnerships. They also feel that Muzz includes users who want to get married, but it feels rushed and premature. Salams and Muzz appear to be on opposite sides of the spectrum, neither offering users an abundance of matches who want to progress into a relationship and ultimately a marriage, at a natural pace.

Users also feel that they may forge decent connections on the app all for a match to disappear or suddenly unmatch them. This can lead to feelings of despair and have users questioning their self confidence and desirability. The nature of dating apps feels fleeting and users mention they feel disposable to their matches, all of which makes them less hopeful to find a long lasting connection on a dating app.