Waplog
A dating app with video chat. Two pieces of work: a modal dialog system that let the product keep changing without shipping an update, and Trivia Guess Who with its iOS widgets.
About Project
Waplog is a dating app built around video chat, with tens of millions of downloads and a place in the US grossing charts for social networking. Both pieces of work here sit inside a product that was already at scale, where a change costs more than it does in a young app.
My Role
I came in as the UX/UI designer on two fronts: rebuilding the modal dialogs that were underperforming, and designing the Trivia Guess Who feature together with the iOS widgets that surface it. Structure planning and the Lottie animation files were mine as well.
Case study · 2021
Modal dialogs
The part of the interface that interrupts you. If it is wrong, it is the most expensive thing on the screen.
What I walked into
I inherited thirty-six modal dialogs, built one at a time by different hands over several years. No two agreed on anything: button colour, button shape, title alignment, corner radius, whether there was a title at all. Buttons came in blue, pink, gold and plain text. One was a bare Android system alert, never designed. One showed an empty circle where its artwork should have been.
These are production screenshots, not a design file. This is what people actually saw.
Twenty-nine of the thirty-six, captured on Android in 2021.
What the mess was costing
Four of them asked you to verify your photo, in four different layouts. Four more asked you to upload one, each in its own way. Three announced a gift in near-identical magenta panels that differed only in wording. The dialogs were the moments where the app asked for something, warned about something or offered something, and they were the moments people dismissed fastest.
Every new one meant a new design, a new build and a new release. I went through all thirty-six rather than redrawing them one by one, and what came out was not a set of screens but a set of parts.
The set
Eleven dialogs assembled from the same parts: a container top with or without a close button, a title and description block, and a body that takes an illustration, an avatar cluster, a benefit list, a text field or a survey. The bottom takes one full-width button, two text actions, or nothing.
Why it mattered more than it looked
The system was built on Android, and structured so the same set could carry to iOS without being redrawn: component containers with adaptable variations rather than one-off screens. That is the whole point of the exercise, and it significantly minimised the need for frequent software updates.
The development team could add, change and reorder dialogs without disrupting the user journey, because the pieces were already in the app. A copy change or a new offer stopped being a release.
Feature
Trivia Guess Who
A guessing game for the oldest question in a dating app: who liked me?
The game
Trivia Guess Who turns the list of people who liked you into something you play for. A reader gets a grid of photo cards and a limited number of chances to pick the one who showed interest. It takes a passive notification and makes it an interaction worth opening the app for.
The game shipped on both iOS and Android. The widgets around it are iOS only.
The same countdown at three sizes. Nothing is added as the widget grows, only the faces you are guessing between.
Widgets, not notifications
The game is complemented by iOS widgets that put the countdown and the recent matches on the home screen. Quick access to the guessing game and to potential matches, without opening the app first.
The small widget carries the timer alone. The medium one adds the faces. Both are a reason to tap, which is the only job a widget has.
Outcome
The dialog system is the piece I would point to. It made a large, live product cheaper to change, and it did that by being boring in the right places: the same containers, the same button rows, the same spacing, assembled differently each time.
Waplog is a VLMedia Inc. product. Screens, artwork and brand assets © VLMedia Inc. All rights reserved, shown here as a record of my design work.
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