I have been tinkering with the idea of creating a dating app for my university for quite some time now — A lightweight platform to discover people at Near East University.
How would it work? That is the same question I asked myself perpetually for the last year. Yesterday (Sunday 26 July 2020), I figured what better way to figure that out than to build an MVP and see what sticks.
I spent the better part of yesterday till 4 am today morning on my keyboard and sketching like a mad man and finally, the site is live
Bambi dating consists of 3 main features which I will discuss below
Match
This is the default home page after signing in. Here you see cards of users you can match with. The users are suggested algorithmically based on gender, similarity to you and people who like you too. You can then follow the user and if they follow you back, you match and can then start chatting.
Likes
On the likes page, you can see profiles of users who liked you. However for privacy and to keep the platform healthy, you won’t be able to see the names of the users until you like them back. The likes feature is a sure indicator of a match
Chat
The Chat feature is just as it sounds — chat with your matches and hit it off. Once you unmatch with a user, your messages disappear in a snap!
Profile
The user profile shows your images and information as it is seen by other users. You can also edit your information on this page.
The matches section shows the number of matches you have, the followers section shows people who like you, and the following section shows who you like.
Conclusion
The beauty of all this is its simplicity. When signing up, you only need to enter your name, age, gender, and what you study to help you get matches.
In further updates and iterations of the application, I will be focusing on increasing match curation accuracy algorithmically to help suggest users with a degree of certainty. I plan to use the Elo Rating System to rank users based on similarity and suggest them.
Moreover, I will integrate Socket-IO into the Chat feature to make the messaging on the application instantaneous.
That’s it for now!
