A Dating App That Doesn't End at the Match
Discovery + Relationship
Product Surfaces
Strategy → Built
Scope
Shipped
Status
Designed and built InteliDate, a dating app built on an unusual premise: the product doesn't disappear once you've matched. Where typical dating apps optimize for the swipe and abandon the user the moment they succeed, InteliDate is designed as a relationship lifecycle — discovery on one side, long-term relationship-building tools on the other. Owned the full arc: product strategy, PRDs, UX architecture, dual-platform design, and the build. The lifecycle is the point, so both halves were designed as equal first-class surfaces.
The Challenge
Every dating app has the same incentive problem: it makes money when you're single and searching, so its product is quietly optimized against the outcome its users actually want. InteliDate inverts that — the thesis is that the harder, more valuable problem starts after two people match, and that an app can earn a place in a relationship over time rather than getting deleted the week a couple becomes official.
That premise is also emotionally loaded. Designing tools that insert software into the formation of a real relationship raises legitimate questions about influence, dependency, and where an app's "help" should stop. Rather than design around that tension, I treated it as a first-class design constraint: what does it look like to build relationship tooling that supports the people using it without quietly making itself indispensable?
What I Delivered
- Complete dual-platform app (iOS and Android) covering both the discovery and the post-match relationship surfaces
- Product strategy and positioning around the relationship-lifecycle thesis
- PRDs defining the two product halves, their hand-off point (the match → relationship transition), and the feature set for each
- Discovery experience: matching and the pre-relationship surface
- Relationship-building toolset: the post-match surface designed to add value over the life of a relationship
- Full UX architecture and interactive prototype
- A deliberate "responsible design" framework for the emotionally loaded surfaces — designing for the user's autonomy rather than for engagement at all costs
The AI Workflow
Co-authored the PRDs that defined the two product halves and their hand-off point, using AI to pressure-test the relationship-lifecycle thesis and surface edge cases in the match → relationship transition before design started. Built the dual-platform UX architecture and interactive prototype with Claude Code, generating both the discovery and post-match surfaces against a shared design system.
The responsible-design framework was treated as an explicit requirement rather than an afterthought — the emotionally loaded surfaces were specified with guardrails around autonomy and dependency baked into the product spec, so the build optimized for user agency rather than raw engagement.