OMYIM

Omyim started as a passion project with a group of friends who wanted to build a dating app.
The project started with a simple question: How can we make dating apps feel more fun, engaging, and meaningful? Traditional dating apps often fall into repetitive swiping mechanics, leading to shallow interactions. Our goal was to rethink the experience—introducing elements of gamification to not only make matching more exciting but also enhance the chat dynamics between users.

As a product designer, I took on the responsibility of branding, design system creation, UX/UI strategy, and shaping the overall user journey. I also worked closely with another designer, guiding them on the UX/UI while ensuring the product felt cohesive and aligned with our vision.

Unlike traditional dating apps that focus on matching mechanics, we wanted Omyim to gamify the entire journey—from discovery to conversation. Instead of static text chats, we explored ways to make chatting more dynamic and engaging.

User Flow & Experience Design:
I worked on defining user flows, ensuring smooth onboarding, intuitive navigation, and a structured approach to chat interactions. A critical aspect was understanding dating-specific UX cases, such as:

• Encouraging meaningful interactions instead of ghosting.
• Designing an appeal flow for abuse cases, ensuring user safety.
• Handling user data privacy in a sensitive and secure way.
• Structuring payment systems for premium features and in-app currency.

Dating UX is delicate – Unlike other social platforms, dating apps deal with emotions, expectations, and vulnerability. The UI/UX must balance excitement with comfort, ensuring users feel safe yet engaged.

Gamification needs a purpose – Adding game-like elements for the sake of it can feel gimmicky. The real challenge was designing interactions that enhanced communication, not distracted from it.

User safety is non-negotiable – Managing user reporting, appeal flows, and content moderation was a major part of our UX considerations.

One of the most exciting aspects of this project was defining the brand identity for the app from the ground up—including the creation of a distinctive mascot. Beyond serving as a visual element, the mascot became a central vehicle for brand storytelling, designed to embody the app's personality and make it more relatable and memorable to users. I explored different character archetypes and visual styles to strike the right emotional tone, ensuring the mascot could scale across various touchpoints—ranging from onboarding screens to marketing materials—while maintaining consistency and charm.

I implemented interactive animations using Rive, allowing the mascot to respond fluidly to user actions while keeping performance highly optimized. This approach ensured the animations remained lightweight and responsive without compromising visual quality. The result was a seamless blend of character-driven branding and delightful microinteractions that elevated the overall user experience and gave the app a unique, memorable presence.

Despite our progress in design and development, we hit an unexpected dead end. Apple repeatedly flagged our app as spam, making it impossible to launch on the App Store.

We explored different approaches, tweaking the app's structure and messaging to align with Apple's guidelines, but every attempt led to another rejection. The process became a time-consuming cycle, forcing us to weigh the effort vs. the viability of moving forward.

Ultimately, the cost—both in time and resources—was too high. After multiple iterations and failed negotiations, we made the difficult decision to cease the project.