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Projects include Website Architecture, Home, Profile, Explore, Chats, and Signup. We built up the site from 0 to 1.
In early 2020, I joined Daency as the sole product designer. A new initiative to explore how to bring a new experience to dance lovers.
At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 was sweeping the world. People started to work from home. Virtual activities and communications were increasingly taking a big part of people's life. Some platforms had immense success with virtual meet-ups. Many people were meeting, catching up, learning, playing, watching, and traveling on the platforms. But these applications were primarily focused on meetings or learnings and lacked the resources for the communities behind virtual steam.
Through research, after virtual meet-ups and events, we found that dance teachers, creators, and performers didn't have a place that was unified to connect people that interested in their work. In parallel, dance students and fans didn't have a reliable place to explore the dancers and creators based on the events for further connections.
With any 0-1 project, we started with building blocks. We want to build a comprehensive platform for dance lovers. People who can explore the classes, join events, and make friends. The start of that was a classes collections page, an events collections page, a profile, friends feeds, and chat groups to follow and engage with each other.
We spent around a year designing and developing the whole website. We kept updatings and iterations from version Alpha to version 4.9. We went through several user tests to make sure we were on the right track.
Classes, events, and challenges are all activities we provided. We do not have much content, they are simple, Straightforward, and designed for dancers and dancing workout lovers. This is the place where people can find high-quality things to start with.
We divided feeds between friends and sitewide. They can check with their friends, especially when they are doing the challenge together. Mark completion (auto), optional to rate and like a class, and publish a social stream update that everyone can see, etc. Also, when their friends are in any events or any steam, they can send the request to join.
People get into dancing classes or events by hearing about a certain theme or creator. People will be added to the message groups when they joined specific classes and events. A powerful message tool is a good way to connect them at the same time. Even the event is finished, they still can look up the participants and information.
At the current stage, the profile is still simple, we do not have that many resources to help user to build up a strong profile. Therefore, it is a basic way to show off who you are. We suggested people add their Ins or Ticktock accounts to know them better. Later when the following feature builds on, a functional profile would be more helpful.
One of the most powerful parts of building a community is connecting users. This helps generate content when you follow someone — along with creating a compelling feed to constantly return to. For example, when you add someone as a friend you immediately can get a rich feed of content they've created, items they’ve purchased, people they’ve followed, or things they've liked. You can share your thoughts, show your work, sell for money, and have fun together.
This is the ideal community we were aiming for. Also, it is a big advantage that we would be differentiated from other competitors. We built it step by step, but there is still a long way to go.
Users were positive and supportive, and the DAU (daily active user) was up to 2100. Our activation rate when up to 54% within the first month of launching.
As a startup, we were building blocks to satisfy needs at the time, so some features were just started. Even now, we still haven't had the chance to combine those blocks. We started with virtual classes, but as the demands changed and several marketing experiments ran, we added daily challenges with friends and group party events later.
Daency is trying to find a new way out as the market has taken a downturn. Running and looking for new opportunities in AI gamification by advanced AI and computer vision technologies to improve quality of life.