BlindDater

Blinddater is a Swedish online dating service that allows people from the USA, Sweden, and some other European countries to find a soulmate recognizing the importance of a person’s inner world and without judging him or her by their appearance.

Now, it consists of three entities: web and mobile applications where users are making matches and an aggregator website that has put together an extensive list of the best dating sites and has a regularly updated blog.

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Overview

Challenge

As a free dating service, Blinddater focuses on creating personalized and unique experiences for those in search of romance and relationships. The web application offers three ways in which users can discover new matches and start a text conversation. They have an option to pass a psychological test to find people whose personality types are going together with theirs. Using the advanced search, they can filter results to display people of certain sex and age, located in the neighborhood within a set maximum distance. With the third solution, the Blinddate Room is opened for one hour daily. All three ways have one feature in common that makes Blinddater stand out among other dating services. Initially, a user does not see the other person. The more words they have exchanged, the less blurred their images look.

Blinddater has introduced the pattern of finding a perfect match so that everybody has his or her chances tripled.

Vilmate was turned to for assistance in updating an existing web application and mobile apps and developing an aggregator website from scratch. By that time, the web app already functioned but the processes needed to be optimized. An appointed tech team had to develop a technology plan and accept certain software re-engineering challenges. It was to be done with a view to taking full advantage of technology innovations that emerged and meeting new business requirements. Vilmate was entrusted with the above tasks and gradually proved to be a reliable nearshore partner.

Solution

Since the client entrusted Vilmate with developing a website, a web app, and a mobile application simultaneously, Vilmate assembled a correspondingly skilled tech team of 1 Full Stack developer, 1 QA engineer, 1 part-time WordPress developer, and 1 Android developer. Blinddate’s aggregator website was successfully developed by our WordPress software engineer and is continuously optimized and updated.

The process of web app development turned out to be much more difficult. The first challenge was posed by the necessity to refactor and re-engineer the existing code. Generally speaking, systemic and operational changes were underway. To be more accurate, with the present APIs, too much data had to be retrieved from a server, which needed some serious improvement. Although the principle of modularity contributed to the structuring and scaling of services, there was an abundance of modules, and the reduction of their number in the Blinddater web app occurred without loss of performance.

Over the year that our team has been involved in the project, substantial improvements in performance for the current app have been made. For instance, the application loads search results faster without users’ waiting for content to be displayed and gazing at loading spinners, which guarantees a smoother user experience. Besides, a primary task of one of the software engineers involved was to improve the software by means of reverse engineering as soon as possible.

Initial development of a mobile application is still in progress, and there has been no stable release of an Android version.

Technology Solution

Result

Vilmate’s engagement in the project has been of crucial importance for changing the perspective and expanding the conceptual basis. Though the work is in progress now, the client has already received a whole new product developed — the Blinddate website. The performance of the web application has been improved and more changes are yet to come.

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“Vilmate really went out of their way to make things right and we still have more on the horizon.”

Despite all the challenges, Vilmate has been providing quality services displaying its dedication to the project and transparency in communication. It was a lot of work that they did to get this complex project moving. There have been some strict deadlines and they managed to organize tasks efficiently, still working hard to get things done. Vilmate really went out of their way to make things right and we still have more on the horizon.

Mikael Löfberg, CEO @ Blinddate