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BTS: Building Boops & DMs

What our newest features mean for the future of Partiful and IRL connections.

Written by

Amadou & Ally

We recently added two new features to the Partiful app — Boops and DMs. We felt like Partiful could help you connect more in real life, by adding new ways for you to connect with each other before or after events.

Ally and Amadou, the design and engineering leads behind Boops and DMs, shared some behind-the-scenes of these new Partiful features.

Why did Partiful add Boop and DM features?

Amadou: Partiful has always been about IRL interactions. And this has worked so well, but that means a lot of people on Partiful are only connected on Partiful, through a mutual event. And so it was important for us to give you a place in the app to interact, so you can strengthen those IRL connections after an event is over.

The longer-term hope, after you use DMs or Boops, is that they take you back in-person again.

Ally: We see people using DMs in so many ways. From telling the host why you can't go, inviting your friends to a party, or best of all - shooting your shot with someone hot on the guest list.

But the biggest value is reconnecting with someone you met at a party. Social media doesn’t always work best for this. You'll meet someone cool. You follow each other on Instagram, you don't really know each other, you talk about your mutuals, maybe. Two months later, you'll like a story, or leave a single comment on a post.

But you go from real life straight to social media, which can really kill a potential connection. Your chances of linking with them again IRL is low to zero.

Amadou: It all started when I went to a dinner party that was hosted on Partiful for Christmas. There were people there that I had never met before, and I met someone I thought was so cool. We hit it off, and I wanted to hang out after but I realized, “Oh, I forgot to get their contact information.”

For me, it felt weird to jump through hoops of, “Let me hit up the host and then try and get in contact with this person,” and I’m not really active on social media.

It made me wish to see a future with Partiful where I could go to someone who I literally spent time with, and send them a message. I pitched it to the team, and that's where Boops came in first.

What was the process for building Boops, and how are people using them?

Ally: We needed to make sure that people even wanted to interact on Partiful in the first place. If we spent five months working on DMs and nobody used it, that would’ve been a huge waste of time.

So we started with Boops: you go to the app, click on someone’s profile from the guest list, and send them a Boop — a single emoji.

It feels very similar to a poke on Facebook. What was a poke, really? You assigned your own meaning to it. Whether it's flirting, whether it's a hello, whether it’s a first step in connecting with someone, like Amadou said, that he wanted to meet and become friends with at a party.

Amadou: When we were conceptualizing this feature, I tested it with Ami (my girlfriend… and my Gen Z consultant). She liked that Boops allowed her to have a really lightweight interaction with others.

Ally: Initially, we thought about just doing a 👋 and that's all. But emojis are so expressive and we wanted to let you choose. A single Boop can mean so much.

You can send a ☕️ as in “Do you want to get coffee” or “You look really tired right now.” Or the 🥊 is awesome — you can have punch wars back and forth.

Amadou: My favorite is 🪩. Or 🕺. It's really fun to send it to friends before events. It's just a good vibe, essentially.

Ally: One of the hardest parts of this project was naming it. We wanted to be unique. It had to be short and memorable. And I think a long term goal was for it to become a verb.

We thought of other ideas like Sparkle, Tickle, Nudge, Bump… and nothing really felt right.

Amadou: We hadn't seen Boop before on other apps, but it is a common word, and we liked the vibe of it — like you’re gently booping someone on the nose.

Ally: We tested with a small percentage of our user base and people loved it! We've been so excited to see people using it — in the product, and as a verb. And that gave us the go ahead to start DMs.

With DMs launching, does this make Partiful a “social media” app?

Amadou: To answer the question bluntly, not “social media.”

It's social though. Partiful, by nature, is social. And Partiful, by nature, is a great utility to help people connect. So “social utility” is probably more right. And DMs are there to help you connect.

When we were building this, we really wanted to make sure that people felt comfortable receiving and sending. When you get a Boop, you only get it one time, and if you don’t Boop them back, it ends there.

There are a lot of safeguards around being able to accept a DM, block someone, or just delete the chat. We wanted to make sure that you feel good about using these features.

Ally: More and more, “social media” has become about unrealistic lifestyles. Partiful cuts all that noise away, and the core use will always be connecting with people in real life.

DMs increase the utility of that. You’re not able to DM someone if you haven’t attended an event together. It's essentially making the interactions you have in-person more seamless. We're not under the impression that you're going to stop using iMessage and just communicate on Partiful. The goal is not to keep people DMing.

We actually would much rather prefer you send a message back and forth and then stop, go to the party, and have a great time.

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