https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0ofyoq9_5Y
Here at xDesign, we love a challenge. And the task of making one of the world’s first ever dating apps for Apple Watch was certainly what we call a challenge!
WatchMe88 may be a dating app, but it’s a dating app with a difference. It is specifically aimed at users who see somebody in a bar or even the supermarket, and want to know if they are available (or interested) before approaching them. It’s not about starting an online relationship. It’s about making people meet each other sooner rather than later. The app allows users to feel empowered and reduces the nagging fear of rejection that forces so many people online in the first place.
With WatchMe88, our Eureka moment was to capitalise on the press and media buzz that was generated by Apple Watch hitting the market in 2015, and release the app along with the Apple Watch itself. But there was just one slight problem… Nobody could get their hands on an Apple Watch yet!
The only way you could possibly get access to one was to receive a golden ticket invite from Apple. But to make things worse, it was only the big tech giants that were receiving them, and to make things even worse again, those invitations were restricted to you spending a limited time together with the watch, in a bunker in Cupertino, California.
This contributed to the fact that when the Apple Watch hit the market, the apps were single faceted, and limited to a single screen.
But not WatchMe88. Essentially we designed the entire app to work in miniature, so when our developer Apple Watch finally arrived, a mere two weeks before the release, it was then that we discovered the screen really was tiny. After several days, and bleary nights, working round the clock, we finally cracked it. xDesign had built the first ever dating app for wearable devices.