Lessons in Onboarding from How I Met My Girlfriend

My girlfriend-now-fiancé and I met on OkCupid met almost exactly 4 years ago. As an aside, we got a terrible compatibility score: 73%. Whether or not we were guinea pigs for one of OkCupid’s bold experiments on their users, I think of the app fondly because it worked out for us, even if I wasn’t on it for very long.

So I was excited to take a look at the service again, this time with my sights on the onboarding experience, with a student-of-UX lens.

Interestingly enough the desktop and mobile landing pages are totally different in visual style. Both are ecclectic and playful, but the feel of the photographs vs rough-outlined illustrations are totally different.

But let’s not get distracted by the visuals. We’re hear to talk about the structure and user-flow here. My classmate and I mapped out the process page by page, on post-its, going from the Setup through Registration and Introduction.

Over all it was a pretty smooth process through the steps, not asking you to do too much per page. Depending on what you input, added content might appear. Like if you identify yourself as “Gay” you get a checkbox option saying “I don’t want to see or be seen by straight people” which I can say from experience is an appealing option if you’re not totally “out” yet.

One thing that was a little unclear for us was where Registration ends and Introduction begins. Once you give your email and make a password (which feels like a commitment moment) then you fill out your basic “Seeking” identifiers, and then they take you through a questionaire about yourself vs what you are looking for. The process through these sections is very linear, only giving you one action to do at a time. The questionaire itself has a cute animation that compiles your answers, then presents you with new questions. It feels less daunting because the visuals make it look like you are staying on the same page.

The ease and simplicity of the design is a little misleading though. They do require that you answer at least 15 questions in the questionnaire, which I don’t think was a requirement when I used the service. This caused some confusion for me since I wanted to skip through to the end. They were giving me an option to “Skip this question” but as I went through the counter at the top of the page stopped counting up. I thought it was broken for a minute before I figured out what was happening.

That user flow was frustrating for me, and I wonder if it is for others as well. I don’t like the feeling that I’m in a tunnel, can’t see what is ahead, and only have one direction to go. The option to go “back” in my browser didn’t work how I expected it to, on multiple pages. On the other hand, I did appreciate there were bite-sized actions for me to do, there could just be more context given about requirements. Right now it feels like….

1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5 > 6 > 7 > 8 > 9 > 10 > 11 > 12 > 13 > 14 > 15 > 16> 17….. that’s exhausting even just to type!

So next up for me will be a new way of presenting the OkCupid user flow and my comments on it in an interactive Axure design. Something post-it-ish. I’ll have to peel myself away from those colors and visual themes and be able to present something more about the structure of it all and the meaning in terms of onboarding. I won’t know how it’ll work until I get there, because this will be something I need to dig into… so “Ciao” for now!