Paired
A mobile app with video courses from top academics, therapists as well as various features that help nourish the relationship you have with your partner.
The brief.
We have an early prototype of the app that we’ve built in Sketch/Marvel, and we’ve been usability testing and iterating the app UX over the past few months. We'd like to work with a product designer to finalise these flows, develop our brand and visual language, and create an elegant, emotionally-engaging interface. The audience for the app is expected to be mostly female, but we’d also like the app to be accessible to men.
Branding.
Defining the brand values - I’ve organised a workshop with the team to help define the core values of the company and brand. That helped guide design decisions and promoted consistency across different touch points. The defined values are Premium, Trustworthy, Inclusive, Expert, Shared, Aspirational, Engaging and Warm.
Taking into account the initial briefing, I aimed at designing a memorable shape that would work well in combination with the logotype and that could be used as the app icon.
Using the split heart shape, I explored a system that would allow the creation of marketing collaterals and subtle branding elements to be used on keys screens of the app.
Socia media assets.
Together with the visual brand exercise, as Paired was going to invest heavily on building a community on Instagram, I’ve provided options for what post templates could look like.
The Mobile app.
We decided to build a simple functional app that could be taken to market and further test the features that had been the main focus on user testing with the initial prototype. Working closely with the founding team, I designed the app from scratch, while trying to to create patterns during the process.
One of the major features was the ability to follow along video courses around different relationship topics. I’ve helped define what that experience looked like, from the moment you discovered a course until you started following and work around exercises that helped you become better at a given topic.
As one of the main features, we decided to focus on developing an experience around exercises with different formats that could be done separately and that could also be tied to the video courses - These were catered to be done solo or as a couple.
When creating the community feature, at the beginning we decided to anonymise everyone and for that we had to create a set of icons that would represent the user’s badge. These were randomised together with the background colours based on the colour palette.
Whilst we predicted that the majority of users would be aiming to have a solo experience, we took the initiative to support bringing your partner on board for a shared experience.
One of the additional features we provided was the ability to answer a questionnaire that would shape up results around your relationship satisfaction. Due to the volume of answers needed to get qualitative results, we created a scoring system that would allow for multiple choice to streamline the completion. Together with that, we took the opportunity to include micro-animations in between steps to try and keep the user engaged.
Final note.
The work I’ve done with the Paired founding team became the reference as a mobile-first SaaS in the field of couples therapy. It has raised a total of $4.6M in funding over 2 rounds. It won Apple App of the Day in Jan. 2024 with 8 million downloads globally. It has been featured on BBC News, The Times, Bustle and more.