Date Sliders
I was a few months into a new relationship and I was noticing I was having a harder and harder time planning interesting dates. A large part of this was caused by decision fatigue, as I did have many plans but could never decide on which to choose. Being the diy-man I am I figured the most optimal way to solve this issue was to build a small web app. The goal was simple: Create a site that lets one partner decide the type of date they want to go and passes that info to the other partner so they can plan the date.
Process
My idea for the tool was that the deciding partner should be able to set a few different "parameters" based on ones desire for the date which would then be seen by the planning partner. The adjustment would be done using a simple slider going from a little to a lot (i.e.: activity level). I was trying to deconstruct which aspects were important in planning a date and narrowed it down to these five: Romance, Adventure, Activity, Nature & Duration. Another option would have been cost, as that tends to be quite important as well, but I decided against adding it as I felt it would not add anything positive to the decision process.
With the criteria being decided it was just a matter of creating a pleasing UI for each element that captures the vibe well and bundling it all into one page. The only "tricky" part was deciding how the chosen options would get transmitted to the other partner. Because I did not want users to have to sign up I was contemplating on adding temporary storage for the results with personal link generation that could then be shared. However since you would have to share a link regardless I figured it would be much simpler to encode the choices inside a GET parameter. This way I could entirely bypass the storage requirement. The downside here was that older links would potentially not work with future versions of the site but considering this was a one-off project I knew I wasnt going to make many changes either way.
Result
This was definitely one of the simplest projects I have done in a while as I kept the scope small and did not bother adding fancy features or any kind of backend to speak of. Nonetheless the resulting site looks and feels great and works exactly as planned. Simply set the sliders to how you want your date to be and send the resulting link to your partner, who then sees the choices you made.
You can check out the site at datesliders.com if you want to try it out yourself!
