Soul Product Analysis Report

Soul was launched in 2016 and quickly captured the hearts of young users with its soul-based social concept, helping them find another confidant in every lonely city. This article will analyze SOUL from the perspective of its core product functions and user usage processes, and explore the essence of social interaction.

1. Product Overview

Soul is a matching and dating APP that focuses on "soul-based friendships, ignoring appearance". The product integrates a variety of test modes, from entry-level to advanced, from fun tests to personality tests. And complete user matching between similar souls based on the tested user attribute data.

When users are chatting and communicating, they can see the degree of compatibility between the two parties, thereby using the attribute of "soul" to promote social interaction between strangers, as well as achieve business goals through product optimization experience through SOUL coin recharge, same-city cards, acceleration cards, super star privileges, etc.

2. Product Positioning

1) Deemphasize appearance and use data to match users with similar "souls" together to promote social interaction between them, thereby generating resonance and establishing empathy to solve users' loneliness (its essence: solving the social needs between users of the opposite sex, which corresponds to Maslow's needs theory, namely the need for belonging and love).

2) Strong privacy and algorithm push to solve the needs of users to express their true selves and vent their emotions freely.

3. User Group Analysis

SOUL's main population is distributed in a series of first- and second-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Chengdu. These cities include a large number of young single people born in the 1990s and "working people" in society, which fully meet SOUL's target users - young people who need to eliminate loneliness and share their lives without social constraints.

The ages are mainly distributed between 20 and 29 years old; and 30 and 39 years old, with the former accounting for 37.5%. People in this age group generally have a higher social intention and are willing to meet new friends and the opposite sex to resolve their loneliness.

From the perspective of gender distribution, women account for 38.57%; men account for 61.43%. It can be seen that men have stronger social needs than women. There are some reasons for this, such as: the number of women in today's society is smaller than that of men, and the social circle of men of this age group is smaller. They want to get to know more about the opposite sex, and the essence of this is to establish a certain emotional relationship with the opposite sex.

Female users are a vulnerable group in terms of social interaction. They are relatively passive and tend to use the privacy of SOUL to share content that they dare not post among their acquaintances and to meet some opposite-sex people with whom they can "get along".

1. User Profile

2. User needs

1) Young people who are about to enter society or are already working find it difficult to meet new friends or the opposite sex due to their small social circles, which leads to the loneliness of today’s “social people” and the need to expand their social circles to eliminate loneliness.

Although there are stranger social products on the market, such as Momo and Tantan, these two products are highly purposeful in the user's social process. After the purpose is achieved, the loneliness cannot be effectively solved. Secondly, this type of social product lacks the emotional transmission of empathy and resonance between users, which means there is a gap in continuous chatting and deep friendships, and cannot meet the need to eliminate loneliness.

2) Contemporary young people face great pressure to socialize with their acquaintances, and usually do not want to show many things to their acquaintances. This creates a need to express themselves and vent emotions freely in a highly private environment.

4. Solution

As the young group's demand for eliminating loneliness increases, and the social products on the market do not meet their needs well, the SOUL application was born. The core function of the product is "soul matching". It uses AI big data to match people with the same interests, hobbies, personalities, and even zodiac signs. It uses the same "soul" as the entry point while downplaying the appearance, to promote deeper "soul social interaction" between users, thereby allowing both parties to empathize and resonate, and eliminate loneliness.

In the interaction of core functions, users do not need to wait too long to complete a [soul matching] task, which takes about 3 seconds. Fast matching can reduce user waiting and form a good product experience. Even if the matched user has a low similarity with themselves, they can quickly match the next user. Only some core functions are proposed here, including group chat parties, voice matching, etc. The purpose of their function design is to meet the user's needs to eliminate loneliness.

In order to meet the needs of users to vent their emotions freely, SOUL has developed the "Moments-Square" and "Designated Face Avatar" functions. The innovative approach provides users with an environment to express their true thoughts anonymously. After users edit content and publish it to the Moments-Square, they can completely hide their personal information according to their own settings, thereby reducing the psychological burden while also venting their emotions.

In terms of visual interaction, SOUL adopts a fresh and cool design that conforms to the aesthetic tastes of young people. The overall page uses refreshing colors and is matched with various innovative gameplays, highlighting the youthful style of the product and gaining high user acceptance.

5. Product Analysis

1. Functional structure diagram

The core functions of SOUL are: planet matching, square moments and chat. The product architecture revolves around the design concept of classification aggregation, combining functions that meet user needs. For example, the homepage includes multiple forms of matching functions such as soul matching, group chat parties, voice matching, video matching, and love bells. These functions will build a bridge for transmitting information between users and meet the needs of matching social networking.

The square is a gathering place for users, where everyone can like and comment on each other's moments, thus forming an atmosphere of a social community. There are also functions such as chatting and publishing, which support the experience of core functions.

2. User flow chart

3. Functional experience

1) Planet

Planets are the core functional points in product positioning. Here users can choose different matching methods to socialize, or they can view the information of users of interest in the planet list and chat with them privately.

The page also includes soul testing, horoscope, screening, love bell ON/OFF, and group chat party functions. These functions further improve the entire social system of SOUL, allowing users to resonate with each other and ultimately establish empathetic relationships.

2) A Soul Test

Soul test serves as the data basis for matching, and it covers a variety of test methods such as friend matching, fun tests, personality tests, etc. Using the test data, SOUL can match users with similar "souls" together to achieve social interaction. The entrance to the function is designed on the homepage, which is convenient for users who have completed the test to match directly. The questions are also designed to be refreshing and concise, and the answers are not difficult.

Here, friends can share the test results on WeChat and QQ to achieve the purpose of pairing up with acquaintances and friends. However, I think this design is redundant because it conflicts with its own positioning, which is to focus on user privacy. In actual scenarios, users may not be willing to share SOUL's social circle with acquaintances.

Let’s take a look at fun tests. Fun tests play a role of “relieving boredom” in the entire soul testing system. After users have completed a large number of personality tests, they may find it boring and tedious. At this time, taking fun tests will make them feel a strong sense of freshness and improve the user experience.

Finally, there is the core testing function that supports the data foundation - personality test. The test is divided into three types: entry-level, advanced, and in-depth. The number of questions increases from a small number to a total of 64 questions, which is quite a lot. It can be seen here that SOUL attaches great importance to user test data. Only when the test data is more complete can the matching be more accurate.

After the test is completed, SOUL will give the user a test feedback based on the results. The overall feedback information is relatively comprehensive, including percentage data and detailed explanations; but when the number of questions is large, there will be lags or even invalid answers, which will seriously affect the experience. In this regard, SOUL also needs to strengthen resource allocation on the server.

In terms of the visual expression of the test feedback, the overall design style tends to be fresh and clean, with soft colors and embellished shapes, which also matches the acceptance of the product's target audience.

3) B Zodiac Horoscope

The horoscope function meets the needs of users who follow horoscopes. Before this, SOUL had no data support for matching horoscopes. Its functional feature is to connect users of the same zodiac sign and those who are compatible with their zodiac sign, thereby promoting social interaction.

In the horoscope, the first-level page contains detailed information about the zodiac, meeting the user's content needs for their own zodiac. The interface is simple and highlights key information.

There is a functional entrance to the constellation square in the bottom navigation, and the number of posted moods of the constellation is marked on the entrance, which can attract as many users as possible. In terms of functional design, it is also a classification system that groups the moments posted by users of the same constellation in the square together. This not only achieves structured content, but also makes user browsing more efficient.

The amount of data at the top represents the popularity of the zodiac. Here we will focus on the tags, which are recommended, latest, and similar topics.

After I tried to refresh the recommendations several times, I found that not all popular content would be recommended. Instead, a lot of content with very low popularity was refreshed. SOUL did this to increase the probability of exposure for more users, thereby encouraging users to publish content. Rich content promotes the healthy development of the community, thus forming a positive cycle. At the same time, the design of comments and likes also satisfies the most basic vanity of social users.

The latest thing is to display newly released content to users, continuously update community content, and improve user experience.

Similar topics serve as contextual navigation, presenting more segmented similar content to users and reducing search costs.

optimization:

Regarding the constellations, I think the point that can be optimized is still in the content. Currently, the content posted by users in the Constellation Square is basically the same type as the content posted in the square. So what is the significance of the Constellation Square?

If the purpose is just to aggregate users of the same zodiac sign, it would be better to directly add zodiac signs to the square. The content of the zodiac square can actually be OGC; but the content produced should be strongly related to the zodiac sign, so as to attract the attention of other users and form a refined zodiac sign community. However, changes to the content may require the support of the operation team.

Another thing is that in terms of guidance, the current function entrance is an ambiguous logo, and users may not know what it is for. It is recommended to design it in the form of pure text to present it to users. On the one hand, the information expressed in text is more direct, and on the other hand, it echoes the soul test on the left to reduce visual fatigue.

4) C screening

The characteristics of the filtering function are very obvious, allowing users to choose to match soulmates of different genders to meet the needs of homosexual and bisexual users.

5) List of D planets

The planet list belongs to the navigation design of the framework layer, where ID information is presented, which can reflect a person's style. Its relationship with other matching functions is: users can rotate the planet to click on the user's browsing moment without choosing other matching methods, and finally socialize. The whole process is simple to interact with, without waiting, which solves the lazy needs of human nature.

At the same time, the functional design is novel, highlighting the spherical shape, which is consistent with the name of the homepage [Planet]. The rotating operation also brings a sense of innovation to users. The entrance is designed in the center of the homepage, and you can operate it by launching the APP, which is very friendly to lazy social users.

optimization:

My suggestion here is to refresh the user information in the list from time to time. Timely updating of information can enhance the user's social experience. After all, it will never be wrong to give users more choices.

6) E Soul Match

As the core function of the product, the matching conditions are supported by the user's "soul data". The system matches users with similar "souls" based on the generated "soul data", promotes social interaction among them, thereby generating resonance and establishing empathy. The Same City Card can realize commercial value and match users with people in the same city.

Analyze the function from the usage process of matching both parties:

When the active party initiates a match, click to initiate the match. After the match is successful, social interaction will begin. The process lasts about 3 seconds. After accepting the match, the "soul information" of both parties will be displayed at the top of their respective pages. Text can be entered below, and click on the avatar to enter the personal moment. This layout refers to the top-down visual design of the eye movement experiment.

When the active party receives a match, social interaction can begin without the need to initiate it. For the active party, the entire interactive process is simple, and matching can be completed by active initiation or passive reception, especially passive reception. For the active party, it undoubtedly increases the matching frequency and improves the experience. When matching, the ball starts to rotate and music plays at the same time, which is very cool. This approach is actually the same as the progress bar prompt on the website, which gives users progress feedback and reduces the sense of waiting.

When the number of matches reaches a certain number or the frequency is too high, the system will give feedback to try again later. I think this is done to increase retention rate; because the system does not display the daily limit on the number of matches, users do not know whether they can still match, which in turn increases the sense of uncertainty. So when feedback comes, users may quit for a while and then continue to match, thereby increasing retention rate.

Passive receivers: Matching can be completed without clicking. According to the usage psychology of passive receivers, first of all, they seldom initiate matching actively, and they may log in just to check the square; but this does not mean that they do not want matching. Therefore, for this type of users with low matching needs, SOUL has designed a mode in which matching can be completed by only one party completing the conditions. This not only increases the social frequency of the product but also brings a good experience to the passive receiver.

Finally, let’s talk about the entrance to this function. Since it is a core function, there will be a great demand for its use by users, and users need to quickly find and complete matching tasks. SOUL has designed this function in a prominent position to make it easy for users to find it.

optimization:

After the match is successful, set a chat value. When the chat value is reached, you can view the other party's instant

Why?

The product positioning of SOUL itself is to satisfy the social interaction between users with similar "souls" while downplaying their appearance, generating resonance and thus establishing empathetic relationships.

The first reason for doing this is to reduce the existence of face-based social networking. After all, most users still look at faces and body figures. This is human nature in social networking.

According to the matching process: the first thing most users do after a successful match is to click on the chat. When users see someone they don’t like or even think is "ugly", they will naturally exit the chat. The result of exiting the chat will lead to a low social frequency of users and violate SOUL’s product concept of weak appearance social networking. The attraction signature and matching degree will appear to be useless.

The second reason is to strengthen SOUL's product positioning of "soul social networking". According to the iterative matching process: when users are successfully matched, they cannot enter the other party's moment. At this time, users can only refer to the gravity signature and the matching degree to socialize (referring to these two points just meets the soul social concept in SOUL's product positioning), or find other topics. In the process of socializing, if both parties can chat with each other and have continuous social interaction; then even if the chat value is reached and they see each other's moment, they will not quickly exit the chat. The result is to consolidate the product positioning, enhance social efficiency, stimulate users' social desire (because users have the purpose of seeing each other's moments in their hearts, and with a purpose driven, they will naturally take action) and improve retention rate (continuous social interaction).

The third reason is that it meets the goal of product commercialization. You can use the recharge of the flight rights package to speed up the opening of instant permissions, which also allows users to develop a psychological state of being driven by a purpose.

How to do it?

You can refer to the existing Soulmate model. A value will be generated during continuous chatting. When a certain value is reached, the viewing permissions of both parties will be instantly revoked. However, this value cannot be set too high. If it is too high, it will increase the user's social cost.

7) F Group Chat Party

Group chat parties are an expectation-based demand, which can be understood as matching multiple users with the same interests and topics for voice and text social interaction. The number of participants and the form of social interaction have changed, and the social content is richer. The functional design meets the group social needs of young user groups in their areas of interest, and the recharge and gifting of the room also achieves business goals.

The overall page has a top-down information layout, with a party-type navigation at the top. Users can quickly locate the party they are interested in by swiping left and right.

Here we focus on analyzing the soul power that realizes commercial value and the design ideas of the soul power list.

Soul force design ideas:

Soul power definition: Soul power is the bargaining chip for exchanging SOUL coins. SOUL coins can be used to purchase gifts and give them as gifts to gain soul power.

In a group chat party, users can send gifts to each other (the gifts will be converted into soul power) instead of just sending gifts to the group owner. SOUL is designed in this way because there is no core role such as "anchor" in the group chat to control the social process.

On the contrary, in SOUL's group chat, everyone can speak, express their own opinions, and everyone has the potential to become the protagonist. The advantage of this design is that it is an encouragement for participating users. The more times they speak and the more active they are, the greater the probability of receiving gifts, and they also have the opportunity to be on the gift recipient list to gain attention. In addition, with more soul power, they can naturally exchange it for SOUL coins for consumption, realizing a positive cycle of social-profit-social, thereby improving the retention rate of the entire function.

Soul Power Ranking Design Ideas:

Soul Power List Definition: When users and group owners receive or contribute soul power, the ranking of the received and contributed soul power will be presented through a list, and subdivided into daily, weekly, and monthly lists.

The original intention of designing this list is to encourage users to create groups. For group owners, creating a group can not only obtain soul power (exchange for SOUL coins) but also get on the group owner list through soul power. The exposure after being on the list can attract more users to enter the room and gain attention; the former brings soul power transactions, and the latter brings fans. For users, it is the same as the above analysis. Encourage them to speak (receiver list) and give gifts (contribution list)

The labels include recommended and latest, and their characteristics are the same as those of the horoscope, so I will not go into details here.

Next is the entrance to the party group chat. The entrance is designed in the center of the page, with the main colors of SOUL being green and blue. Each party has a corresponding information flow, such as: party type, party ID, and number of people online, which basically meets the information requirements of users when choosing a party.

After entering the room, you can ask the host to open the microphone and chat by text input. At the same time, the host and the administrator have the right to control all users to go on the microphone, which can maintain the harmony of the room. You can also follow the host by clicking on the host's avatar. After following, the host will appear in the follow tag at the top, which is convenient for users to quickly locate the host during the next group chat.

The overall layout is basically similar to that of the live broadcast room, with all users concentrated on the right side. In terms of usage, the thumb of the right hand is exactly at the position of the avatar. I think this is a design made by SOUL to allow users to quickly check on each other at the moment. Other interactive designs such as zooming in and out, inviting close friends, and changing rooms with one click also enhance the user experience.

The last step is to create a party and do random matching. When creating a party, there is a group owner certification, which is to control the quality of the entire group chat. When creating a party, you can choose the party type, name, and background image. The design of the background image is very fresh and simple, which is consistent with the overall style of SOUL. Random matching caters to some lazy users, who can join the group chat with just one click.

optimization:

Added homeowner transfer function:

Why?

According to the user's usage scenario, when they enter an area of ​​interest and have a certain sense of participation, they hope that the social interaction on this topic will continue; if the entire room is disbanded due to the departure of the host, it will bring a poor experience to the participating users, so that they have to find a new room and establish a sense of participation. Moreover, as the room changes, the participants in it also change, resulting in increased operating costs, time costs, and communication costs.

SOUL sets the maximum duration of group chats to 24 hours, which indirectly shows that SOUL still hopes that group chats can last as long as possible.

In summary, transferring the homeowner can allow interest-based social interaction to continue and bring a good user experience.

How to do it?

For example: when host 1 quits, host 2 can be designated to transfer the room. When host 2 quits, host 3 can be designated to transfer the room. When host 3 quits and finds that no user is willing to take over the room, he can choose to disband the room, because no user is willing to take over means that no user wants the social interaction to continue. Even if a small number of users want to continue, host 3 can choose to transfer and disband the room. The former maintains the social interaction, and the latter reduces the cost of disbanding the room.

The specific design may add a transfer option in the opt-out pop-up window, and the transfer can specify the user.

8) G Voice matching, video matching

These two features innovate the matching method, giving users who prefer voice and appearance an additional choice. Let me briefly explain the overall mechanism.

Voice matching: Click to match. When the voice chat reaches 4 minutes, it will automatically end and close. Before that, both parties can reveal their identities. After revealing their identities, they can view each other's moments and continue the voice chat. This function actually depends entirely on whether the two users can chat well and whether there are enough topics. Only when these two points are in place can there be subsequent social interaction.

I haven't tested the video matching function. After all, Edison Chen's face is not something that anyone can look at easily, hahahaha.

9) H Square

After the user posts the moment, the information appears in the square.

The square meets the basic social needs of users. The content posted to the square can be forwarded, liked, commented on, and gifted, allowing users to interact with each other (user goal), thereby forming a community and recharging SOUL coins (product goal).

The camera function in the upper left corner has multiple filters for users to choose from, meeting the young people's demand for beauty.

The square has three label categories: follow, recommend, and discover.

Following, as the name suggests, means displaying the content posted by the followed users. When there are no followers, the system will instantly recommend users with high matching degree, thus accelerating the collision of souls.

The recommendation algorithm is a little different. It combines less popular moments with more popular moments for recommendation. Maybe after a version iteration, the latest is replaced by discovery, so that only the latest content can be put into the recommendation. The role of recommendation is generally to attract attention to new content and prevent old content from sinking.

Here I would like to focus on discovery. I think it belongs to the expectation-based demand. The feature is to classify and aggregate the moments of interests and professional fields posted by content creation users, so that content consumption users can choose the moments posted by the former according to their own interests in the discovery system to browse, collect, like, comment, forward and other operations and establish social relationships with content creation users; this is a typical UGC system, which not only meets the needs of consumer users for content, but also gives creators the opportunity to be exposed, allowing them to gain attention and continue to produce content, meet the needs of consumer users, and users can also give gifts in each discovery, thereby achieving the product's commercial goals.

The information design of Discovery is similar to that of the group chat party. Users can select content in the area of ​​their interest by sliding on the top and using the drop-down box. The first-level page only presents the homepage picture, dynamic video, user ID, and number of likes, because of the user's visual fatigue and workstation occupancy. After entering the second-level page, content browsing is a waterfall-style interaction (similar to TikTok). You can follow the area in the upper right corner, and you can also view the publisher's moments, private chat, and other operations.

Search can locate content more accurately. Users can search for content of interest based on their keywords, or select popular content through hot search. These popular contents are designed in the same way as the discovery system, which classifies and aggregates users' moments.

I think the radio player meets the excitement demand. The original intention of the design here is to use the mutual collaboration of text, video and radio to meet multi-faceted needs. The radio station itself has creators and consumers and belongs to the UGC system. At the same time, you can select different radio stations in the player and perform operations such as likes, follows, enter moments, send gifts, etc.

Finally, I want to complain about the deletion interaction of the music player. SOUL is designed at the bottom, which is not very user-friendly. First, the distance is long, and second, it is inconvenient. It is recommended to design it on the right.

The message prompt is in the lower right corner, and you can click it with your bent thumb. The message includes interactions, dynamics, gifts, notifications, and the moments when I like, comment, collect, and vote. You can also see all the interactive information for the message in the details.

Finally, let's analyze the ID of users in the square. Based on the privacy in the product positioning, SOUL hides the ID and makes it into information from a certain planet, topic or radio station. Firstly, it satisfies the privacy requirement, and secondly, it opens up new entry channels for these topics and radio stations.

10) I Release

Through this function, users can publish content to the square. It is a simple content publishing function, but SOUL has made many innovations in this area. For example, on the basis of text and pictures, you can also publish radio stations, voice, voting, moods, etc., which meets the user's multi-faceted publishing needs and makes the APP more fun and more flexible.

11) J Message

Chatting can be said to be the core function of social interaction. Only with communication can the emotional connection between both parties be enhanced and social interaction can be maintained continuously.

In SOUL, users can set their chat status at will. Once it is closed, they will no longer be matched. This design also satisfies some users who have weaker chat needs.

The address book can quickly locate close friends and fans, so you don’t have to look for them one by one, satisfying the convenience of socializing with acquaintances.

In the chat, SOUL has designed read and unread functions:

For the sender, the read message can intuitively feel whether the message he sent has received feedback, which has both advantages and disadvantages in the scenario of stranger social interaction.

Let’s talk about the benefits first. When a message has been read but not replied to, the sender will think that he or she has said something wrong and may continue to send follow-up messages, thus promoting continuous social interaction and information output.

As for the disadvantages, when the message has been read but not replied, the sender will think that the other party does not want to reply or is very busy, and may not bother the other party again, resulting in social interruption and poor social experience.

For the recipients, the read design will encourage them to reply out of politeness, thus promoting the output of information. Not replying to the read message will also convey a message to the sender in disguise: I don’t want to reply to you, please don’t bother me.

Unread also tends to favor the sender's experience. When a message is unread, the sender will clearly believe that the receiver has not seen the message, and thus feel relieved.

Soulmate, translated into Chinese as "confidant", is a status value that lights up in sequence according to the length of time the two parties chat. I think SOUL designed it this way because it uses the status value to promote the social frequency of both parties and allows users to accelerate the lighting of the status value by consuming SOUL coins to achieve the product's commercial goals; for users, the lighting of Soulmate will make them more willing to stay on the platform and chat with their "confidant", but the disadvantage here is that the lighting time of Soulmate is too long. I myself have experienced a week of chat frequency, and only one letter was lit up. I hope SOUL can speed up this lighting progress and let users feel the feedback intuitively.

I won’t go into details about adding friends and scanning in the upper right corner, as it is a channel to expand your circle of friends.

In the chat search, users can enter nicknames and chat records to search, and can sort chat records by conditions such as the last chat time, letter lighting progress, current online, etc. These designs can help users quickly locate chat records and improve the user experience.

VI. Conclusion

SOUL's product positioning is to focus on social networking without relying on appearance, but in my opinion, this trend of SOUL will gradually disappear, or even has already disappeared, and will be replaced by social networking based on appearance; because I believe that the essence of social networking is still sex, and this cannot be changed by any social product.

On this issue, SOUL should think of a way to take care of more users who do not have the advantage of photos on the basis of a certain level of appearance social networking, so that their social interaction can continue. After all, the balance between appearance and soul social interaction is the core of the stable development of the product.

Author: Swimming Belt Girl

Source: Swim Belt Girl