Design Critique #6: Hinge(iOS)
How to design a better online dating experience?
Our social life has been affected a lot during the quarantine. It’s hard to catch up with old friends and meet new friends. In this week’s design critique, We discover and discuss different dating apps’ design decisions with a focus on the dating application Hinge.
As a user, what kind of dating apps do you want?
Background
Dating apps originated in the gay community; Grindr and Scruff, which helped single men link up by searching for other active users within a specific geographic radius, launched in 2009 and 2010, respectively. With the launch of Tinder in 2012, people of all sexualities could start looking for love, or sex, or casual dating, and it quickly became the most popular dating app on the market. Shortly thereafter, many more dating apps came online. (Ashley, 2018) Hinge was created in 2012 with the mindset “design to be deleted”.
User Experience
Color Choice
Different dating apps choose different color schemes to represent their own personality:
- Tinder chooses fire and warm color scheme to represent the passion and excitement that the app creates to its users.
- Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB) mixes red and blue together to create both warm and “serious commitment” feeling.
- Hinge chooses black and purple to maintain a cool and serious feeling.
- Humble uses the warm yellow rather than Tinder’s red to create a safe and warm context for users.
On-boarding Experience
Dating app onboarding experience requires users to signup the account and set up their profiles. There are mainly two different onboarding practices in the market.
- Easy and Quick Signup
Tinder provides easy and quick signup for users. The signup process requires location information and mobile phone number. In the profile setup page, it only requires name, company, education, and an open-ended self-description. Easy and quick sign up allows users to quickly start using the app, however, the app has less user preference information to help match users with their dates.
- Signup with detailed information and prompts
Some dating apps require users to provide more information about themselves.
For example, in the profile setup page for Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB), Users are prompted different questions including occupation, schools, hobbies, etc to tailor users’ profiles and preferences. CMB uses a clear progress bar at the top to indicate the profile setup process.
Hinge uses similar methods as CMB for user profiles setup. The prompts and answers provide other users with a better understanding of the person and are also used for a better matching mechanism at Hinge’s backend. However, some users mentioned about lack of clear progress bar on Hinge’s prompts (3rd picture below).
Hinge adds a deal-breaker in preference for users’ better match. Users can select multiple deal-breakers and Hinge’s algorithm will use those criteria to recommend dates for users.
Matching Experience
Different applications choose different matching algorithms.
In 2012, Tinder started with the very famous “Swiping” interaction on its app. “Swiping” is inspired by slot machine gaming psychology. With the simple swiping left to pass a person and swiping right to like a person, each person has unlimited swiping every day in Tinder. If you happen to swipe right for a person and that person swipes right for you as well, you two are matched. You can start talking to each other.
Hinge was a “Swiping” app before, however, they redesigned their matching experience based on user data: “Only one in 500 Hinge swipes led to a phone number exchange, and 81 percent of Hinge users reported that they had never found a long-term relationship through a swiping app,” says Tim MacGougan, Chief Product Officer at Hinge. Great dates, according to Tim, are a matter of timing and compatibility. (Christopher,2018) Hinge noticed that it’s difficult to discern the true connection from photos, therefore, they abandoned the “Swiping” matching and introduced “Content Liking”. “Content liking” allows users to like specific content (photos or other contents) from other users. They can also see which of their content has been liked by whom.
In the old swiping model, people tended to like a person because they were curious if that person liked them, not for actual interest. Through this change, Hinge wants its users to focus on their matches and not the next person.
During our discussion, lots of us agree on “liking a picture or comment” is less stressful compared to like a person directly. Besides, it’s easy for people to start the pickup lines.
How many likes per day?
Another question that has been largely discussed during our discussion is “Shall we set a limitation of how many likes each user can send and receive per day?”
Hinge limits the number of likes that one user can send per day for the free account while the premium account is allowed to send unlimited likes.
Personally, I prefer a limited number of likes.
- Firstly, limitation makes every likes count. It makes the “like” more “serious” and makes receivers appreciate those “likes”.
- Secondly, limit the number of likes people receive per day also makes the app less annoying. People can focus on building on the conversation they currently have. From the research, timing is super important for dating app users, if they receive unlimited likes every day, it’s super common that they will ignore some of the conversations as it’s hard to maintain the communication with lots of people at the same time every day. Although Hinge tries to use “your turn” tag to remind people for continuing the conversation, too many overwhelmed likes and conversations create information overload for users.
Summary
In this week’s critique session, we focus on analyzing dating apps’ color scheme, onboarding experience, and matching journey.
Questions that are worth thinking if you want to explore more on dating apps including:
- What is the main purpose and primary users of the dating app?
- How do the color choices of the app serve the main purpose?
- What are the essential user information for this app to better serve its objective?
- What is the matching experience that the app creates for its users? How to find a balance between encouraging uses to use the app and not providing too overwhelming “like” notifications for users?
- How to design the best matching experience to help users find a compatible date?
- How does the LGBT community involvement change the design in a dating app?
Utilimitaly, these lead to “how to create a comfortable online dating experience for users?”
What’s Next?
In the next week, we will talk about “the most popular” app recently: ZOOM
Join our discussion by posting a response below! Feel free to reach out for anything :)
