Falling in Love with Good Design

So, Koi, I know you are super merry, but for those of us who are still out there, dating apps are a big part of our lives. So we did something kind of funny a couple of weeks ago for this podcast, but really for science. We got three single people in a studio for a dating panel to ask them to talk about dating apps. Can I play what happened? Please. First, our panelists all swapped phones. But you can't see men on it. You can have my grinder. You have Rachel's hinge. OK. Let me just say, too. I just get really tired and overwhelmed by it. Why am I still on this app and why am I still looking at these boring men? OK, so after they swapped phones, that is clearly when the commiserating began. Butch at desperate singles. Hey, yeah. You wanted a natural reaction. OK, that's rude. Peter, Parker, and Karyan are not desperate, but they are all technically single. I think that this app in particular is really excellent at making me feel terrible about yourself. They say that black women are the least likely to get picked on apps anyway. I got to see the guys that they show me. The dude on a yacht with a six pack, and I'm like, this isn't my future. When I'm creating the profile, I just sit there and I'm like, God, I'm so boring. I'm looking at my camera roll and trying to answer these questions and being like, this isn't good enough. It feels like, what are you selling? Like, what do you have to offer to the world? OK, so this is horrible because I know Karyan, and she's fantastic. She has a lot to offer. Yeah, I'm sure she doesn't. I think that's the whole point. If you zoom out from this description of what life is like in the apps, you've taken this very messy and qualitative experience of meeting people and all of these random and unpredictable vectors that is highly qualitative. Then you put it into a very quantitative construct, which is a database. We are more and more just putting all of our lives into a database than expecting the database to produce essentially a query result that works for some goal that we're trying to achieve, whether it's shopping for groceries or looking for a date for Saturday night. This is my query result. Is such a great way of talking about your partner? Wait, why is query result not the name of a gay dating app? So today, we're going to be talking about online dating because we live in a time when dating apps seem to be claiming that they can design for love. But our question is, are they really just designing for endless swiping? Welcome to Wireframe from Adobe in Gimlet Creative, a podcast about good user experience design and how we shape technology to fit into our lives. I'm Koi Vin, principal designer at Adobe. And today I'm here with our editor, Rachel Ward. Rachel, where are you here? Lara actually started producing this episode, but I'm going to bring it over the finish line for it because Lara's out getting married. Oh, that's ironic. Did they meet on an app? No, they did not. Oh. She did talk to a lot of people who use apps and who build apps, but Koi, neither of those types of people are you. So what do you know about dating apps? I know that they have become the primary way of meeting people. Yep, that's right. And so to understand how that all started, I want to give you a little more background and to help me out with this. I've pulled in Dr. Liesel Sharabi, who studies online dating at the University of West Virginia. She remembers when online dating was sort of like an awkward thing that you didn't tell your friends about. Sometimes people were kind of embarrassed to admit that they did it. It was this idea that they couldn't find somebody in the real world, so they had to resort to finding somebody online. And then something happened that changed how people felt about dating online. Tinder. And Tinder's great innovation was the swipe. And all of the sudden, people were able to swipe through all of these seemingly available dates. And that made the experience feel fun, like it was a game. So Tinder became super popular. And within a year of its introduction, it was already one of the top 25 social networking apps. Right, and that's when online dating became less taboo, right? Exactly. But that also meant there were all these new users in this space where there wasn't an established etiquette. So people can kind of behave however they want. And that led to some kind of gnarly behavior, which in 2015 was characterized by vanity fair as a dating apocalypse. Here's Dr. Sharabi again. People kind of got fearful that maybe this was going to kill dating. It was going to destroy relationships. Nobody was going to want to date someone seriously anymore. People felt like Tinder had turned into a hook up app where people were treating each other terribly. They were sending rude messages. They were ghosting each other, treating it like seamless delivery, but for people. And that's when there started to be a lot of backlash to Tinder and its imitators. The Guardian, New York magazine, the Atlantic Vox, you start seeing articles everywhere that are critical of Tinder, saying it's this harbinger of the death of romance. And Dr. Sharabi says part of the problem is that Tinder gave users the feeling that there was always someone else out there. There's this idea that if there are plenty of fish in the sea, what does that mean to whether or not you're actually going to want to settle down with any of them. So if you don't like one thing about a person, you know that you can go back on the app tomorrow and find somebody else. So, Quay, you're a designer. Is all this backlash happening? You're actively watching romance die and you think? This is a problem. But there's probably also an opportunity. Right. So here's one of the problems that designers set out to solve. How do you show users potential matches that they might actually like? Right, so why is that so hard? The first challenge is getting to a match. The point where I say, "I like someone," and then that someone says, "I like you too." But before you can match with someone you have to consider them, which can be hard when it feels like you're swiping through endless options. Here's Karian. A lot of times, like, I'll just be like, "I hate everybody. It's going so fast. I don't like anyone." Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, that was it." And then it's like, "Oh, wait, no, he likes fish." Just to be clear, she's talking about the band fish, right? Yes. Okay. So, we're talking about something that all of our panelists brought up. Dr. Shorabi calls it choice overload. Too many options can actually be bad for your dating prospects. So, one of the classic studies on choice overload presented people with a lot of options of different flavors of jam, and then they also presented them with fewer options, and they looked at their decision-making. And they found that when people had more choices, they tended to be a little bit less satisfied. Dr. Shorabi says that if you take this idea and apply it to dating and swiping, it's inevitably going to lead to some bad behavior. It can start to feel almost like you're shopping. And so I think sometimes, just by design, people can kind of get into that mindset where they're evaluating people, making snap judgments, and maybe not really considering that this is another human being. Okay. So, this brings us to the quest to make better matches. Matches that are more sincere, more thoughtful. And one of the companies that's trying to do this is hinge. I'm Tim McGuggan. I am the chief product officer of hinge. So back in the day, hinge was basically a tender lookalike. It was a swiping app. But after the dating apocalypse, hinge wanted to get away from the swipe and get their users better matches. So to do that, they took on a huge redesign. One of the design choices we made in the new version of hinge is that you land on a person's full profile. And we never really show a sort of thumbnail version of a person. So on hinge, you don't have to click through to learn more about a person. It's all right in front of you with a really quick scroll down. Right. So it sounds like it becomes easier and maybe even mandatory that you spend time looking at a person's profile. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it slows you down when you're looking at all of these potential matches. And then another thing hinge introduced with the redesign was a UX element that they call content liking. I can't just blank it like a person. I have to choose something on the profile to like. And I have the option to comment on it. And so content liking is the type of thing that lets you know that I'm looking at your profile. The way this works on hinge is that there are these blocks, these content blocks, all down the page. It almost looks like a Twitter feed where it's like interspersed with text and images. So the image on my profile page might be like me petting a dog or it might be text where I'm answering a prompt like, let's debate this topic Godzilla versus King Kong. And then in each of those blocks of content, there's a little heart icon in the corner. And that's how you say I like this person. You hit the heart icon and then you can comment also. And that communicates to the person that you like them. So, how does this concept of content liking sort of sync up with UX design? Is there like a UX principle that this is drawing on? What designers do a lot of times is try to pace you in the experience that they're creating. So sometimes they try to usher you through really quickly and sometimes they want to draw your attention to specific details so that you'll consider more carefully your next action. And I think that's exactly what's happening here. Yeah, the thing about content liking is that it kind of to the user, it looks like it's giving you something to open with. It's giving you like sort of like a pickup line. But there's another thing that content liking is doing. It's making you think harder about the person that you're looking at. It makes people much more selective. So, before it was really easy to just swipe right and say yes, yes kind of became a maybe. But now with content liking on hinge, you have to find something kind of specific to like about the person or say to the person in order to say yes to them. And Dr. Shirabi says that any way you can limit that behavior of endless swiping has the potential to really improve matching. Any sort of app that restricts the number of profiles people can swipe through in a certain amount of time might make them more seriously consider the profiles that they are being presented with. So just by figuring out how many profiles you're going to allow people to look at that could have a big impact I think on the user experience. And that's exactly what hinge found after they made the change. Our users after that change were about twice as selective. We were creating many fewer matches. But those matches were way more likely to result in conversations and dates. And so our users were going on more dates and having more conversations even though they had fewer matches. It's so interesting because technology solution is always more technology, right? What they're saying here is not put the app down and go out into the world and actually engage with people. What they're saying is, oh give the database more information. And the more information you give us, the more you engage with the database, the less you'll need the database somehow. So I'm just naturally skeptical of that proposition. Is it really going to work? Yeah, and remember, we've only addressed the first part of the problem, finding the match. When you are swiping, swiping, swiping. And then it's like, ah, a match, it kind of feels like you've collected a golden coin in a video game or something. And then honestly, it's like you just keep going because it's like so hard to like get out of that. That feeling of like, ah, I could get more coins. So more gold coins after the break. This episode of Wireframe is brought to you by Adobe XD. XD is made for designers and organizations that need to design at scale. Let's say your creative team goes from six designers and developers building one experience to 30 designers and developers building multiple experiences. You'll need an effective design system to keep your team members in sync and your designs on brand. With XD, your design system can do both. There's no more games of telephone, no more passing around sticky notes with hex codes on them, no more missing components in the web library. Ever project you're working on, every element you create and reuse links back to one place, the original system. XD is everything you need to quickly create and manage your design system. You can wireframe, design, prototype, present and share multiple experiences. Work better together. Learn more at Adobe.ly/Gimlin. Welcome back to Wireframe. We're talking about how designers have tried to solve dating with dating apps. So before the break we were talking about how swiping and matching has this feeling of getting a gold coin like in a video game, you get a little rush from the app that makes you want to use the app more. And there's a term for that right, Koi. Addictive design. Little plug for season one episode is good design, good for you. Well done. Very subtle. But if you did want to listen, it's in the same place where you found this podcast just keep scrolling. And list scrolling, that brings us back to online dating and the challenge of how to make an overload of choices into an actual date. It's easy to forget that for these users they have a whole journey ahead of them. So if you really want to make them successful, you have to think about what happens beyond the app. There's the swiping and the matching and the swiping and the matching. The dating part where you actually physically go out with people is still a whole other part of the ideal experience that hinge can't control for you. Instead, you wind up endlessly messaging people. And this is something that we talked about in the dating round table. Peter gave me and Parker his phone and he let us read a conversation between him and another user. Happy Wednesday. How's your week so far? It's good. I just got back to the States after a long two months away. Whoa, where were you? Germany, Austria, Czech Republic. That sounds amazing. Just for fun. Slash the sake of adventures. Yup. Have a dream of going to Antarctica to see penguins and glaciers while they're still around. Good luck. Times ticking. Clock emoji. Yup. We're all going to die. And that's fine. Everything is fine. But anyway, any interesting grabbing a drink sometimes so you can tell me all about your trip? A lot of conversations. Yeah, I don't like it. The humble brag about traveling around the world and then the cynical comments about the end of the world, that sounds really hard. You don't talk like those two friends. I mean, I do, but it's like, but all of the concepts of like trying to transact, you know, it adds a different, you know, color to it. But Peter didn't actually transact, he matched, he messaged, but no date. So getting to meet someone in person can be really hard when the app is mostly designed to help you match. So of course, there is an app that thinks it has the solution. Bounce is an app that when you match, you meet. This is Dylan Petro. He is the founder of Bounce. It's a pretty new app and it's only available in New York City, but they do have a design that I think you'll find interesting from the beginning. They understood that endless messaging is a big part of the app problem. We thought about other dating products, the process to match to message is very straightforward. But then from that message aspect to the date aspect, there's a ton of ambiguity. How long do you message for? When's the first message set? Who's deciding where to go? There's just a lot of ambiguity that happens there that oftentimes leads to the date not happening. So they turn the whole thing on its ear. What they do. The way Bounce works is you turn on the app at a specific time, usually around 5 o'clock on a Thursday or a Friday. The moment the app goes live, that's when you can start seeing other users and matching with them, but only for 15 minutes. Once you match with one person, that's the person you're going out with that night. This means that for the user, you're hardly messaging at all. And Dr. Shirabi thinks that's a good thing. Research would say that you don't want to spend too much time communicating before you meet for the first time because you might start to build up expectations, but there's still a lot that you don't know. Right, that makes sense. But what if you change your mind and decide you don't want to go out on that date? I mean, what if you just flake? That's like a very rigorous set of like guidelines and rules to try and prevent that. I would check in, I would select my neighborhoods where I'm willing to meet, and then it would prompt me with a couple of important statements which say, "Hey, make sure you're actually free tonight at 7 o'clock." Because if you cancel, not only will we, like, ding your account, and if you cancel too frequently, you actually get suspended. Does it work? A couple of us have tried to use it, and no one has actually gone on a date. Oh, okay. Why do you think it doesn't work? It sounds like a high barrier to entry. Got to be in the right place at the right time. You got to be ready to go out that night and you got to be satisfied with the match. The idea is so intuitively good. You're like, "Oh, the part about dating is I want to go on dates." When you use the app, you commit to 15 minutes, and then you don't wind up with any matches. You've just spent 15 minutes being hard rejected by strangers. That does not feel good. Oh, yeah, I can imagine. I think what's happening here is that the app is essentially closing off too many possibilities for its users. Maybe they need more time to make their decision, or maybe they need the flexibility to not go out that particular night. It just needs to be less prescriptive so that people can find their way to actually meeting. On the other hand, it feels familiar because feeling bad seems to just be part and parcel with dating apps. It came up a lot in our round table. I'm sure so. Here's Peter. I think you're able to convince yourself, "Oh, everyone's life is more interesting than mine." When all the information you get is a picture of a guy in a yacht. You're like, "Oh, he's on yachts. I'm not on yachts." I feel like, I don't know. I feel like garbage. I feel like I have lots of problems that a yacht man doesn't have. I think no designer wants that. Every designer wants the user to be delighted. Right. There is an app that we found where being responsible with people's feelings is part of what they're trying to accomplish. I think perhaps it won't be a surprise to learn that it's an app that was designed by a woman for a woman. Okay. I want to introduce you to Robin Exton. She's the founder of the dating app Her, which was founded by and for queer women. When Robin first had the idea for Her back in 2013, there weren't as many options out there. She was using E Harmony, which is a web-based platform. And one of her co-workers was using Grindr, which is a dating app directed at gay men, and then they would sit there and compare notes. We were talking about how it felt to be a Grindr user versus any Harmony user. And the difference in perspective and mentality about what it meant to be a data. And on Grindr, it felt incredible. It felt that you had the power and on e Harmony, it felt like you were trying to fix something that was wrong in your life. And you were slightly broken by being single. So Robin decided to build her own version of Grindr for women. And that's how her got started. It was modeled on Grindr in both intention and design. Let's take this gay guy dating website and rescind it for women and help people hook up faster. But it totally did not work. The queer women on the app weren't connecting. And it turns out by modeling her app on Grindr, Robin had made some assumptions about her users. The biggest learnings that we had was like one, most women on looking for casual sex. They very much think that they are on occasion, which I think is a very true belief. But the volume of times that they are going to take an action to get that outcome is very small. Once Robin and her team realized this, it started to change how they thought about the design of the app. It just changed like how the relevancy of all these features, seeing someone that is very close to you, is irrelevant if you are not meeting up within a one hour window. Most of our users were arranging dates five to seven days in advance. Yeah, so I think the design lesson here is that a solution that works really well for one kind of user isn't necessarily going to work well for another kind of user. Exactly. And Robin also had this insight that there was another feature that users weren't getting that they wanted. Chat was like the main thing. So I think the average number of messages in a grinder exchange is like 2.2 messages or something like that. On her, it's something like 27.3 messages. So Robin and her team started thinking about how to make changes that would accommodate that user behavior, basically create that slower experience and also help foster more sincere connections. So they implemented some new design elements to push users to talk to each other and keep the conversation going. So what does that look like? For example, if a conversation lags, the app will ask you questions. Some of them are really thoughtful. Some of them are extremely inane. How many days a week is too many to a flannel? Even if the conversation means you're saying that's a stupid question. Like at least it has started. Like it's just that first interaction is really hard. Her got the insight that people wanted to connect around content by observing how users were interacting on their blog. People were actually having really big conversations in that comment section and they weren't able to find a profile through there. Then they would do these work around to try and find other profiles. Yeah. I think that's an example of how users will come up with ways of getting value out of your product or your platform. So in some ways it's not surprising that they're doing an end run around the channels that have been explicitly laid out for them. I think in some ways hers taking a swing at the same problem that bounce is trying to solve, helping people find a way to actually meet in person. But hers design is less prescriptive than bounces. It's not match and meet or else it's if you want to come, this is going on. We've done like doggie meetup events. We've done camping trips. We did stitch and bitch nights so we would get users in and knit and like everyone told about their coming out stories. What happens is that meeting up in person is a way to have a more holistic, deeding experience when there doesn't revolve around endless swiping and too many choices. It's a different type of exploration like online you are exploring in isolation and until you meet up. But being in a group is such a different experience. It changes how you believe in yourself and believe in your community and I think that's what events can do for people. We're basically redesigned what we've always done which is meet in person but added sort of a digital assistant layer which Dr. Shraabi says is one of the really nice qualities of this current wave of deeding apps. I personally think they have the right idea in trying to more closely approximate what people are used to traditionally. When they're dating it used to be that you would choose a partner based on physical attractiveness based on their proximity to you and so some of these apps are kind of going back to that. It's kind of taking it back to dating's roots. Because no matter how great the matching algorithm gets, there is still that big unknown factor which is love. There's some pretty strong sentiment in the literature that these apps really haven't figured out compatibility and that it's hard to know if two people are going to be compatible in real life based on some questions they fill out on a dating site. So quite throughout this episode you've a little bit played the role of Seneca. Guilty. Having heard everything that you've heard today, do you still feel that way? Yeah, I think it's a bit unfair of me to take such a cynical approach to the way these dating apps work because finding someone to fall in love with is fundamentally difficult. It's actually one of the life's biggest challenges. And so I actually believe that these apps aren't just trying to optimize for endless swiping. They really genuinely do want you to fall in love. And the reason is that if you meet somebody on this app and you go out on a first date and then a hundred more dates and then you fall in love and get married, there's no more powerful endorsement for the app because when people ask you at your wedding, how do you meet this person, you'll say, oh, we met on an app and that's really, really effective because that gives these apps the opportunity to become the Google updating, which is what everybody wants. These designers are just tackling a really, really difficult problem. Oh, you're a romantic. Yeah, yeah, ultimately I am. Thanks for listening to Wireframe. This is our last show of the season and we really hope you've had as much fun listening as we've had making it. Wireframe is produced by Laura Morris, Amy Stanton, James T. Green, Matilda Irfelino, and Abbey Riseka. Max Gibson helped with his episode. Rachel Ward is our editor, mixed and sound designed by Catherine Anderson, original music composed by Billy Libby, theme song by Peter Leonard, fact checking by Sirea Shockley, and special shout out to BA Parker, Peter Bresnan, and Carrie Ann Thomas for letting us scroll through their dating profiles. You can subscribe to Wireframe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts. And leave us a review. We'd love to hear what you think. Wireframe is a production of Adobe and Gimlet Creative. To dig in deeper on the UX of online dating, visit the blog at adobe.ly/wireframe. To try out Adobe XD for yourself, download it for free at adobe.ly/gimlet. I'm Koi then. Thanks for listening.