Role - Product/UI/UX Designer - Freelance
Timeline - 6 months
Tools - Figma, Photoshop, & Illustrator
Project Scope - Mobile App + Web App
Industry - Dating & Social Networking
Collaboration - Individual
CASE STUDY
ChitChat24 — Community-Based Dating & Social Platform
Project use case
ChitChat24 is a community-based dating and social platform, built for both web and mobile. Instead of centering on profile browsing and swiping, it's built around Lounges — interest, topic, and experience-based communities spread across 17 categories (Career & Studies, Love & Relationships, Friendship & Social, Sports, Spiritual & Mindfulness, and more), each holding around 10 individual Lounges. People join a Lounge to talk with others who share the same interest or situation, and can move to private messaging once both sides want to.
A solo founder brought me in to design this from a blank slate — no existing product, no prior version — as a six-month freelance project.
Problem Statement
Most dating apps are built around browsing photos and profiles first, which makes it hard to judge whether two people would actually get along before deciding to connect. The founder's frustration with that gap was the starting point for ChitChat24: a platform where people build understanding of each other through real conversation before deciding to connect privately.
- Traditional apps front-load a decision (swipe, match) before any real conversation happens.
- No real middle ground existed between anonymous browsing and committing to a one-on-one chat.
- A dating-only framing excludes people looking for friendship, community, or companionship rather than romance.
- Needed a way to bring people together by shared interest or life situation, not just attraction.
Goals
- Help users build real connections through interaction, not matching algorithms.
- Serve more than dating — friendship, companionship, community, and networking — without the whole platform reading as a dating app.
- Support a freemium model: an ad-supported free tier, and subscription for extra features and an ad-free experience.
- Keep discovery simple even as the number of Lounges and categories grows.
Process
One idea — Lounges as the entry point to connection — carried through research, structure, and every screen that followed.
Define
Understood the founder's core frustration: dating apps skip real conversation, and built the product around fixing that.
Research
Ran a handful of user surveys and worked through assumptions directly with the founder; studied swipe-based apps and community platforms for reference.
Ideate
Explored organizing people by shared interest and life situation instead of by profile, which became the Lounge concept.
Prototype & Testing
Iterated with the founder throughout, including one full visual redesign partway through that kept the same feature set.
Visual Design
Sketched low-fidelity first, then built out ~70–80 web screens (20 main), ~90–110 mobile screens (30 main), and 5 marketing-site screens in Figma — most with animation to keep the experience feeling alive.
Structure
Built a category → Lounge hierarchy (17 categories, ~10 Lounges each) to keep discovery simple as the platform grows.
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Research
A handful of user surveys, combined with reasoning through assumptions directly with the founder, since there was no existing product or user base to study. For competitive reference, I looked at swipe-based dating apps (QuackQuack, Tinder, Bumble) for what to move away from, and community platforms (Discord, Reddit) for how open group conversation works at scale. For visual language, I looked outside the category entirely — Disney, Netflix, and Spotify — for how a large, varied product can still feel like one coherent brand.
Challenges
Keeping it from feeling like two products. The hardest problem was balancing the open community side with the private dating side without it feeling like two separate experiences bolted together. The fix was making Lounges themselves the entry point into connection — you don't browse profiles and then optionally chat; you join a conversation, and a private connection can grow out of that if both people want it.
Verification needed real thought. The platform mixes group chat with private connection for an 18+ audience, so I landed on one phone number per account rather than email — phone numbers are harder to duplicate and are linked to Aadhaar in India, which cuts down on fake accounts without adding friction for real users. Reporting and blocking are built in alongside it.
Direction shifted once. Partway through, the founder came back wanting a full visual redesign with the same feature set. I redesigned it, and it was approved from there.
Competitor Analysis
Swipe-based apps (QuackQuack, Tinder, Bumble) showed what to move away from — profile-first browsing that skips real conversation. Community platforms (Discord, Reddit) showed how open, topic-based conversation works at scale, which shaped how Lounges function as group spaces. Neither category covered what ChitChat24 actually needed — community discovery that can lead somewhere more private — so the Lounge-to-private-chat flow was built specifically to bridge that gap.
Outcome
The product is still in active development — I'm continuing to work with the founder through the build phase now. The direction landed well with him; development is going smoothly, and he's confident enough in where it's headed to be planning next steps. It isn't public yet, so there's no launch data to point to, and I'd rather say that plainly than fill this with numbers that don't exist.
Beyond the interface, this project pushed me into thinking about the product side more than screens alone — how revenue actually works for a subscription-and-ads model, how to keep ads from disrupting the experience, and how to turn a founder's instinct into something structured enough for a team to build.
User Flow
The core path stays the same for every user: explore categories, discover a relevant Lounge, join and participate in the conversation, and send a friend request if you want to continue with someone privately — an accepted request unlocks one-on-one messaging.
Final Design
The final product centers on Lounges — 17 categories, each holding around 10 individual spaces, structured so a newcomer can find something relevant without being shown everything at once. Inside a Lounge, people talk through group chat, shared activities, and music before deciding whether to connect one-on-one.
Moving to private messaging requires a friend request rather than an open DM — a deliberate gate that keeps the connection consensual and, longer-term, ties into how premium access works. Premium, once switched on, will remove ads, add more private conversations, and give priority visibility; for now everything is unlocked while the platform builds its user base, but both versions are already designed.
Verification runs on one phone number per account rather than email, since a phone number is much harder to duplicate — a quiet but deliberate way of keeping the platform free of fake accounts without adding friction for real users.
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