Finding a perfect match to date is tough as it is, but finding a chance to meet available and right people as a single parent is nearly impossible. For single parents, they date with more concerns than the younger population, thinking of their kids, busy work, and more.

Dating Anxiety
Many single parents feel overwhelmingly nervous to start dating again after having focused on their children for a long period of time. They have also mentioned that even when they go out for a date, they often encounter some awkward and uncomfortable moments during the date.
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Security Concerns
Most single parents have no idea how dating apps work at all and it raises a great concern about whether it is safe to use such apps. Data privacy and authenticity become big issues to be addressed.
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Fear of Insincerity
Single parents have a big fear of meeting someone who is not serious towards the relationship. At this stage of their life, dating someone really means finding a match whom they could share their life with in a long term.
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Popular dating apps nowadays like Tinder and Bumble cater to the young generation users. These users can be best described as "adventurers" who are highly engaged in dating and more open to meeting different new people online. The "life-planner" quadrant generally includes more aged user groups who actively date people but, compared to young people, seek a more serious relationship and plan to develop the relationship further after the dating stage. However, single parents still differ from the "life-planner" portrait because they tend to have a much lower desire to engage in dating. With what they have experienced in the past, they tend to be more "old-school" and cautious about developing a new romantic relationship, not to mention meeting new people online.
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While these features could increase the chance to get more credible users, they came with a big cost of diminishing the enjoyment of using the app. First of all, it could be hard to get buy-in with such a long "questionnaire" registration. The long process became a barrier and most users would not bother devoting their time to completing it while having no idea whether the app could be helpful. The same logic applied to the second idea. Writing all the sections could become "too much" for most mobile users. What's more, patiently reading through a stranger's story could also be overwhelming. again:

It ended up that photos might still be the most effective way to build online connections. But how to guarantee an online dating environment that is safe but at the same time relaxing? I did some research on the most popular dating apps now on the market including Tinder, Bumble, CoffeMeetsBagel, Hinge, and Eharmony.

There I discovered mainly two problems from these apps that needed to be addressed:

1. Only one chance to decide match a user or not;
2. Only huge profile photos are displayed telling nothing about the user's real life.

And the final idea was to provide a platform that encourages users to share the present moments of their daily life through photos. For single parents, an optimal destination of dating is the fusion of the two's originally separate lives. By knowing more about other users' daily life before dating, it could help them to decide on better matches starting from the very beginning.

Enjoyable & Relaxing: Encouraging users to share little moments such as drinking a chill afternoon coffee or reading an inspiring book, there is no attempt to magnify the users' identity as single parents. Every user is treated as a unique entity with his or her own personality, and the photos tell that story.

Safe & Reliable: In the onboarding process, Lifusion would require the industry standard verification as other dating apps. More than that, in Lifusion, an active and trustworthy profile could be easily identified with the photos the user has shared on the platform.

Meaningful: Users get to know each other by browsing their moments shared in the morning, afternoon and night, during either weekdays or weekends. This facilitates a deeper understanding between users, allowing them to take a look at the person's daily life while at the same time solving the problem in the earlier ideas of the time-consuming text information required from the users. Deeper connections are built by an easy photo-sharing experience in Lifusion.
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Based on the low-fidelity prototype testing with 5 single-parent users and some design feedback from my peers, I made some major changes to improve the design.

When later working on the high-fidelity prototype, I also iterated over the UI elements to make all the colors and graphics look consistent and better serve the content.

User research matters.
For this project, the deepest lesson I learned is the importance of user research. At the very beginning of the project, all I thought of was how single parents would care much about their children when they dated new people. However, the research showed that single parents have various interests and things they care about, just like all other people. Detecting the root pain points of single parents has prevented me from going in the wrong direction at the very beginning.

Don't be afraid to iterate.
We should never be afraid to iterate our design again and again. Even sometimes we have to start all from the scratch with a totally new design, we should be confident that our previous iterations have helped us to come to a better solution.