Designing for social interaction
Bildkontakte is a social platform focused on helping people meet and connect.
As UX Designer, I worked across acquisition, mobile communication and social interaction mechanics, combining experimentation with interaction design across different parts of the product.
- Company
- Bildkontakte
- Role
- UX Designer
- Product
- Social / Dating Platform
- Timeline
- 2014 – 2017
01Improving landing page conversion
01Improving landing page conversion
The landing page was one of the most important acquisition touchpoints, with a strong focus on turning visitors into registered users.
I worked on different versions of the page and ran A/B tests across hero layouts, messaging and imagery to understand which combinations performed better.
Testing showed that images of people looking directly at the viewer performed better than more passive imagery.
That insight influenced how we approached visual direction on acquisition pages and reinforced an important lesson: seemingly small visual decisions can have a measurable effect on user behaviour.
Landing-page variants tested to compare hero imagery, messaging and layout.
03Designing chat as a core social experience
03Designing chat as a core social experience
Chat was a central part of the Bildkontakte experience because it went beyond simple one-to-one messaging.
The product combined private conversations with public chatrooms, giving users a space to meet, talk and interact before deciding whether to connect more personally.
At a time when many dating products were becoming increasingly focused on profiles and photos, chatrooms gave Bildkontakte a more social and community-driven dimension.
The design challenge was to bring both modes together in a mobile experience that made it easy to move between discovering conversations, participating in group chats and continuing interactions privately.
I worked on the structure and interaction patterns of the chat experience, balancing immediacy with the need to keep different types of conversations understandable and accessible.
- Group chatrooms
- Private conversations
Mobile messaging: inbox, private conversations and empty states.
What changed
These projects covered very different parts of the product, but they shared the same underlying challenge: designing interactions that encouraged people to participate.
From improving acquisition, to supporting meaningful conversations, to reconsidering potentially negative engagement mechanics, the work pushed me to think beyond interface design and consider how product choices shape behaviour.
What I took from it
Bildkontakte gave me early experience in areas that continued throughout my career:
- •using experimentation to inform product decisions
- •designing interaction-heavy consumer products
- •balancing engagement with user experience
- •thinking about social mechanics from both sides of the interaction
Want to learn more?
There's more behind the experiments, interaction patterns and product decisions across these projects.
02Rethinking profile picture ratings
02Rethinking profile picture ratings
Bildkontakte included a feature where users could rate profile pictures from 0 to 10.
The mechanic created engagement, but it also created a clear downside: people could receive low scores from complete strangers and see those ratings directly.
That meant a feature intended to be playful could easily become a source of frustration.
The challenge was to preserve the discovery and engagement value of the mechanic while reducing the feeling of being negatively judged.
I explored different models, including:
How can a social mechanic create engagement without making the people being rated feel worse?
Team workshop mapping alternatives to the 0–10 rating: stars, likes and ranking.