The explosion of Tinder with its social aspects has ushered in a wave of dating apps, each with their own unique twist. Jason Loia, COO of Unravel, gave a lecture entitled How Dating App Design Can Enhance Your Mobile Game at Casual Connect USA. This included analytical insights which Unravel, a mobile dating and social discovery app built by a team of seasoned gamers, has amassed over almost a year of in-market data. While designing a game, Jason advices, “Attack your biggest funnel leaks first”.
Jason Loia, COO of Unravel, describes this app as a gamified social discovery app. His function is to assemble and guide a talented team of PMs, designers and engineers, people he feels are the stars behind the app. He takes his work very seriously, especially since he knows that several team members have had their lives profoundly changed by apps similar to the one they are building. He says, “I know this is an opportunity for everyone on the team to build something very special and that can equally change the lives of millions of others as it did for them.”
The Right Team
The essential qualities Jason looks for in team members are “smarts, passion and team play.” While he recognizes that it is a huge advantage to find the person who is the premier expert in their area, he insists, “If a candidate is off-the-charts bright, demonstrates a deep belief in the potential of the app, and can bring out the best thinking and output of those around them, that’s who I want on my team every day of the week.”
Finding the outstanding talent with a background that perfectly matches the mission of the app is the most difficult aspect of building the team, particularly when pioneering new space. However, he believes, “Those that grok will join wholeheartedly because something in their life experiences tells them ‘I get it, this will completely change the way people do X’. We’ve been extremely fortunate to attract top caliber talent to our team, especially in roles like Product Management and UI/UX design.”
The Really, Really Cool App!
What Jason enjoys most about his work is the time when he is holding a fresh build of an app, casually playing with it until he loses all focus on anything else, and suddenly realizes, “Wow, this app is really, really cool!” As he describes it, “The hundreds of hours of analysis, specs, design, coding, QA-ing, all of the hard work from the team that goes into making THIS piece of software, it all just comes to life on the screen in that moment.”
Jason finds his gaming background very valuable in working with Unravel. It is fascinating for him to work with a gaming team to design and build an app which isn’t a conventional game but uses game design and game theory to connect people in a playful way, at a deeper level through personalized content. It is the first time he can claim they are building a 100% interactive social game.
This particular career path was not something Jason originally planned. He served in the coast guard for a number of years, then transitioned to the games industry, where the mission is entertainment. After developing games for fifteen years, he welcomed the opportunity to apply his knowledge to the broader cause of connecting people. His passion for this work is evident as he describes, “In the gaming world we’ve all witnessed how gaming can bring people closer together, and even bring total strangers together. I look around our office today and I see folks who have met through a game, and even gone on to get married and have kids. There’s something clearly magical in that, and if I can play a part in bringing people together who just otherwise would never have met, then count me in.”
Jason became involved in the games industry immediately after finishing business school. He was fortunate to be part of the first mobile games movement, in a small company called Lavastorm. This game studio of no more than twelve developed games for J2ME and BREW devices, with the huge challenge of squeezing Space Invaders or Defender onto 64k of memory and a 54 pixel screen. Having grown up in a gamer household, he tremendously enjoyed bringing classic games to these pocket-sized gaming platforms. And because there was not yet any mobile game industry, they were exploring an entirely new space with no rules. He still enjoys remembering what they were doing and the talented people they were doing it with.
Gathering Information to Perfect the App
The team at Unravel is heavily data driven but they still have frequent play test sessions. Because of their proximity to the app, they can lose the perspective of the first time user; testing can be helpful in discovering problems such as UX leaks. Testing is also helpful in assessing multiplayer behavior. As Jason says, “There’s no substitute for handing some user your app and seeing how they engage with it: are they having fun, do their eyes pop when they achieve that adrenaline moment in the game, are they leaning in?” He points out that most “aha moments” don’t show up in data, but they do in players’ reactions during testing. “Numbers can’t fully describe humans.”
But it is also important to balance feedback from focus groups with information from the data, the intent of the feature, and how they plan to affect habit formation. Listening blindly to every piece of feedback, according to Jason, will never allow the giant leaps forward. He quotes Mark Brooks’ sage advice, “People often don’t know what they really want, or say what they want, so observe behavior to know who people really are and what they really want.”
Jason has been fascinated to learn, while testing, how immersed people can become with personal trivia content. They become their own level designers by customizing content about themselves that other players, including friends and strangers, will play through. “The content of the app is designed to be playful but to reveal various aspects of what makes you the person you are, from your quirky side to your deepest values on religion, relationships, family and life,” he reveals. “You only need to create three levels to start playing others, but folks will fill out all thirty levels because it truly does become an engaging, introspective experience.”
The Convergence of Gaming and Social Discovery
The next big trend in the games industry will be the convergence of gaming and social discovery, Jason believes, since digital natives have now 
embraced casual gaming and casual social discovery via mobile. He expects it to evolve beyond dating; there is already a significant trend in the Unravel app for those not in the dating scene to use it to play personal trivia with friends. The game mechanic reveals so much about friends that after only a few sessions, friends may learn things about each other they have never known before.
“You can take me out of the video games industry, but you can’t take the gamer out of me,” Jason claims. He looks forward to every new release of the big FPS games. He is also an avid tennis player, motorcyclist and cyclist.
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