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What do you think of on-line dating?
Posted : 7 Jun, 2011 07:41 PM
On-line dating does not work very well for most people. There are too many people who are rude, flaky, don't follow through, or are currently seeing someone but they haven't taken down their profile. It can be a huge time waster and high quality people generally do not have a lot of free time. At a minimum, the on-line dating services should (i) not display profiles where the members have not logged in for X weeks and (ii) flag those who don't respond to most of the people who write to them.
Nevertheless, on-line dating is a necessary evil.
How would you improve Internet dating sites?
As someone with a lot of experience designing interactive systems, I'm amazed at how badly designed most Internet dating sites are. It's clear these sites have done little usability testing. (That's where you sit 100 people picked at random in front of a computer and then watch them use your brilliant system. Inevitably you make major changes after realizing that almost no one can figure out how to use your system.)
Most profiles don't tell you much information about the person. Since most people aren't very good at writing profiles, it makes more sense to have lots of questions to answer rather than their writing one long profile. Most of these questions would include not only checkboxes but space to answer the question in your own words. Possible questions could include:
Describe your interests
Which hobbies are important to share?
Describe your perfect first date
How much do you like pets? Are you allergic to any animals?
Describe your social-political views? How important is it that your partner share your views?
Describe your perfect Sunday
Describe an ideal vacation
Which newspapers and magazines do you read on a regular basis?
Which books have most influenced you?
How often do you attend cultural events? Which ones?
Which foreign languages do you speak? How well do you speak them?
Which countries have you visited? Which countries have you lived in?
How often do you go to parties?
What are your thoughts on feminism?
What are your thoughts about male-female romantic relationships?
How important is religion to you? How often do you go to services?
Do you go to bed early or are you a night owl?
Describe your ideal relationship
What have you learned from previous relationships?
Again, for most of these questions, you would not only check off boxes (making searches easy if one cares about that) but you would also answer these questions in your own words.
People should be asked to list where they went to college and graduate school and what they majored in.
The dating sites don't ask many questions about the person's profession. I always find it interesting to know what a person does for a living, and there ought to be space where the person can answer that question in detail. (I have a preference, for example, for women that have jobs that involve intellectual complexity.) On Match.Com, there are categories, such "Artist / Creative / Performer," which are much too broad. The person could say something like "I'm a graphic designer who works for a major advertising agency. I design both print material and Web sites." That gives me much more of a feel for what they do. "I teach at a private high school in the western suburbs. I teach Latin and Ancient Greek to 10th and 11th graders" is much more informative than "teacher."
People should be asked how many hours a week they work and how often they travel for work. If someone is a workaholic and works 70 hours a week, you probably want to know that. If someone is a management consultant and they are on the road Monday through Friday, that's something you may want to know.
People should be asked how much time they have to date someone they are interested in. If someone says, "I have my kids six days of the week and thus can only date on Thursday," that's useful information.
People should be asked how affectionate they are and how do they feel about public displays of affection ("PDA"). Attitudes toward PDA are often indicative of other deeper issues.
People should be asked what they don't like. The problem with many profiles is that everyone speaks six foreign languages, has traveled to several dozen countries, has climbed Mount Everest, tutors low-income children, and cures cancer on the side. Tell me what you don't like. If you say, "I really don't like cats, I don't enjoy overnight camping trips (I need to stay in a hotel), and I hate country music," I have a much better feel for you as a person than you're telling me what you like.
People should be asked what kind of relationship are they looking for (e.g., Flings, Casual relationship, Serious relationship, I'm looking to get married and don't want to date someone once I've decided I'm not going to marry them).
The person should be asked to describe how they want the process to unfold. I avoid women who want an endless serious of e-mails before they even have a phone call. If someone wrote, "It takes a while before I feel comfortable talking on the phone," I would know to avoid her. Other responses might include something like, "I need to have several telephone calls before I meet someone."
Jdate has a few features that other sites should add. On jdate, you can see who has hot listed you and who has viewed your profile. This encourages flirtation. If you see that someone has hot listed you but has never contacted you, you can write something like "I noticed you hot listed me and I congratulate you on your excellent taste. How about coffee next Thursday?"
Dating services ought to get serious about manners. There ought to be an easy way to determine what percentage of initial e-mails are responded to by a particular person; this statistic would be listed on their profile. If it was below, say, 50 percent, some kind of warning would appear. One would be able to search only for those who answered more than one-half of the initial e-mails sent to them. When searches are conducted, anyone falling below this 50 percent threshold should not be included in any search.
At the same time, the computer should keep track of when someone has not responded to an initial e-mail, and send a reminder every one or two weeks that they need to respond.
Match.com lists how long ago they have been active. Anyone who has been more inactive for more than one month should not included in any search or matching feature.
One should be able to easily hide one's profile when you are dating someone exclusively. When a profile is hidden, it would not appear on any search or match. At the same time, if you type in the correct screen name, the profile should appear. A lot of times you want to see a profile of someone you've corresponded with, and if the profile is hidden, currently you just get an error message.
When you list your preferences for a man, in addition to the preferences you should be required to rank that preference on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being nice to have but not really that essential and 5 being an absolute dealbreaker. If you're 34 and you're absolutely certain that under no circumstances whatsoever will you date someone less than 30, then age would be a 5. That would mean no one who is less than 30 would ever appear in a search or match. (One should obviously use this feature carefully, since your Prince Charming could be 29.)
At the same time, you should be able to view his scores between 1 and 5. If you're Protestant and he's Jewish, and he said having a woman with the same religion is a 5, then you know not to waste your time on him.
The system should flag in color incompatibilities between you and him. Let's assume the system only flags 4s and 5s. 4s could be flagged in yellow and 5 could be flagged in red. That way, you would quickly notice the incompatibilities and then you decide whether to proceed.
You should be able to make yourself invisible to men with certain characteristics. If you decide that under no circumstances will you date someone more than 30 miles from where you live, you could choose to make yourself invisible to anyone who lives further away. One of the complaints many highly educated women have is that they receive e-mails from men who clearly aren't appropriate � e.g., women neurosurgeons being approached by truck drivers. ("It's obvious that many of the men who write to me only look at my picture and don't read my profile.") If you know you won't date anyone who hasn't at least attended college, you could make yourself invisible to those with only a high school diploma.
The biggest problem with online dating is that you can't tell chemistry. Dating sites should be much more proactive in encouraging people to record a voice message. Voice is a significant factor in whether you're attracted to someone, and from a voice message you could get a sense of how articulate they are, their energy level, and does their accent appeal to you.
Beyond voice recording, the next step would be to have video imaging. Imagine you could click a button and then see a 1 minute video of someone, from which you could get a sense of body language and how they respond to questions. It's obviously not as good as meeting someone at a party, but it would be a lot better than a picture. There are enormous practical impediments to this, but if implemented it would go a long way to answering, "What will the chemistry be like when I meet him?"
There should be many more features to manage profiles and the process.
There should be a text box into which you can type summary comments � e.g., "I talked with him in June, 2004 and I decided not to meet him," or "We met in August, 2003 and I didn't feel any chemistry." A lot of times, profiles pop up years later and you can't remember what your reaction was, particularly if your interaction with him was brief. As you learned more information about him, such as his full name and his phone numbers, you could enter this information in the text box. These comments could not be viewed by anyone other than yourself.
One big problem is that people can change their screen name. Two years ago you interact with someone named "Smart college professor." Two years later, he changes his screen name to "Brilliant literary critic." You might not even know this is the same person, particularly if he doesn't have a picture online.
I would deal with this problem in several ways. First, the text box I mentioned would be there irrespective of how many times he changed his screen name. You would simply read the comments you entered two years ago. Second, all of your correspondence would be there, so you could review the e-mails. Third, the system should tell you all previous screen names of this person, so if you didn't make any notes to yourself but you remember "Smart college professor," you won't be taken by surprise.
You should be able to create and manage folders into which you would place profiles. You might have folders such as "Have a date set up," "Need to Call," "Think About," and so on. You could easily move profiles between these folders, and a profile could be assigned to more than one folder. You could have as many folders as you wanted, you could call them anything you wanted, and you could even have a hierarchy of folders (i.e., folders within other folders).
The system should be able to track all e-mails back and forth between you and a given person. You would be able to see in one place all of the correspondence between you and that person, no matter how far back it was.
One should be able to specify a date in the future for followup. If you meet a guy online and he says he is seeing someone, and you want to check in with him 6 months from now to see if he is still "taken," you should be able to type in that date and 6 months from now, the system would remind you. Or perhaps you've talked on the phone and he is going away for a month; you'd want the system to remind you one month from now.
You should be able to choose "Ignore" for any profile. If you've viewed a profile and you're certain you're not interested, or you've got out with him and know you never want to go out with him again, you would choose "Ignore." What that would mean is that his profile would never be included in any search or matching. You should also be able to choose "Make myself invisible" to a specific profile, which means your profile would never be any search conducted by him.
Finally, there is the potential for much confusion when people are on more than one dating site. A man could be "Handsome California surfer" on one site and "Happy athlete" on another. Ideally there would be some way for these sites to cross-reference each other. Technically this would be feasible if the sites shared information and people were required to enter enough personal information about themselves (which would not be listed on their profile), and then the sites would simply exchange this information once a day. But realistically this is not going to happen.
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