India Dating Ecosystem : A Short overview

Dating ecosystem looks badly broken to me in India. The biggest reason for this, according to me, is our culture which does not encourage the idea of dating. A dating concept that worked extremely well in US or Europe will not work that well in India because of the same reason. If we go by the traditional values, the concept of dating is almost non-existent and we are hardwired from childhood that parents will arrange your partner. The society is accepting the idea of dating, but extremely slowly. It is a different debate weather dating is actually an effective way to find potential partner, but I want to discuss 5 challenges that dating as a product has to face in Indian market

• Culture, again : The culture of arranged marriages obviously discourages the dating, but other than that, dating for a reason other than marriage is also frowned upon in India especially for girls. Since dating culture is not very open here, you may not find people who will openly accept that they have a dating profile.
• Lack of concept clarity : Since the culture is not prevalent here, people generally lack the understanding of dating in general. You might find profiles where person is looking only for friendship or professional networking or even general social survey.
• Gender ratio : Generally males will outnumber females in dating profiles anywhere in the world, India is no exception. There are several other India-specific factors, including the ones that I wrote in first point, which discourages girls to create profiles on dating websites and thus the gender ratio is even more skewed here.
• Fake data : It is a general internet world problem but in case of dating it becomes extremely important to filter fake profiles. The aim of dating sites is eventually making two people meet in real world to take things forward, so fake data is a big hurdle and prevents people from trusting the websites. It might even require to moderate profiles at a granular level. This lack of trust leads to lower adaptation.
• Different concept for different audience : Not everyone is looking for serious relationship and not everyone is looking for flings. These are two different segments and single solution can not cater both. The dating websites have to become exclusive caterer of one of these segments, it otherwise increases useless profiles from other segment.

Many companies have tried to penetrate this market in India in several different ways, but none achieved a significant success rate. Most of them are cloning the famous Tinder, especially their swipe left/right idea to instantly like or dislike someone. While understanding the loopholes in current dating market, I thought to install a completely Indian app and review their product. There were options like Aisle, QuackQuack, TrulyMadly etc. I randomly installed TrulyMadly. I used it for around 2 weeks, noticed app design, user experience, matchmaking and finally came up with this.

Vision : I read some old press articles about TrulyMadly, they started to project themselves as the app which will find a serious partner for you, their About Us too suggests this. So they have chosen their segment out of the two that I wrote in 5th point.

Onboarding :

It takes a little long for app to complete the Facebook login. They should look into the possible optimisation on server or client (mobile app) to make it quicker, if there is no scope, display some positive one liners about the app to keep user entertained.

Basic information queries to setup profile is smooth. Though the color of Next button is dull, might give the feeling of being disabled.

Instead of asking users to write a paragraph on ‘About Me’, it asks them to write 5 words that best describe them in hashtag format. This was creative, instead of reading the paragraph about potential matches, just glance those 5 words and you know what’s cool about them.

Profile : This is of core importance to any user and it sets the base for matchmaking algorithm too. I found bugs that are so clearly visible that no one could have ignored them.

It shows name of my college twice, if I remove one instance it removes the other too.

Favorites page has strange bug, if I select to edit my favorite music, the cursor instead goes to edit favorite item just above it, i.e. movies. It happens with all the items, if I try to edit books, it instead goes to edit my music. It should be a very small fix on developer’s end though, but such a bug should have been caught before releasing app live.

What purpose does showing friends count serve? Having lots of friends does not necessarily mean trustworthy profile, fake profiles have hundreds of friends too.

Friends invite page is well explained with arrows, but tutorial is required only once. It is probably an image that they are using everytime someone clicks on invite button. It should rather be replaced with tooltip like element.

If I open the friends invite page and then cancel, even then message displayed is ‘Invitation sent’.

One very nice feature of app is profile photos moderation. It rejected my photos where my face was not visible. I tried uploading photos of Shahid Kapoor and Kit Harington, it rejected them after a while. Such moderations are extremely important to keep fakes away.

Matches :

It does not display the name of your match, probably to keep stalkers away because it is fairly easy to find someone on Facebook if you know name and current job info. If you create pickup lines using their names, that option is eliminated here :D

No user likes this, but company has to earn money too. It could have been shown as the last match when user has exhausted his real matches for now.

One more clearly visible bug, I clicked on the emoticons icon and it is empty :O

Also there is something wrong with the typing spacing too.

Miss TM does not reply, ever, why does she exist. She can be given some intelligence to help users.

Settings :

The biggest UI turnoff was navigation menu. It is so badly designed, it does not look like a finished screen. If I was asked to change one thing in the app, it would be this, it is that ugly. Many better navigation drawer libraries available for iOS apps.

Text inside different tabs of settings page has bad formatting, its font should be uniformly matched with the theme of app.

Trust Score : It is an innovative way to solve the trust and fake users issues but I doubt its effectiveness. According to app, people having atleast 30% trust score are allowed to see matches. One can get 30% trust score by a Facebook login, which defeats the whole purpose of trust score! Every dating app lets Facebook users use all functionalities of app and so do you, so how exactly does trust score make a difference?

If I were to redesign trust score, I would keep it as a dynamic score which may go up or down depending upon the activity of user.

Stores Reviews: The app seems to score low on user satisfaction on both Appstore and Playstore. More than 28% users on Playstore and 75% on Appstore rated it 3 or below, I tend to call this Unhappiness Quotient because this indicates what percent of users are unhappy. Majority of them are complaining about improper login, zero matches in months, verification strategies & incorrect marital status of profiles. Company needs to put in more serious efforts to bring Unhappiness Quotient below 20%

I would conclude with one final thought, as Mahesh Murthy had written in his blog that regulation barriers in India do not exist so it is not wise to build ‘X of India’. Facebook of India is Facebook, Google of India is Google and Tinder of India is Tinder. If dating companies in India try to become Tinder of India, they will fail. The need is to think beyond Tinder.

In my opinion, companies need to rethink more about Like/Dislike mechanism, right now almost all of them use the typical Tinder swipe Left/Right to implement this. Liking/Disliking a profile says a lot about the taste & preference of a user, which can be used to improve the personalized matchmaking algorithm for that user instead of relying only upon the age & distance window.