Tinder Lovin’ — Survey #2
What do we really want?
Tinder reports that 80% of their users are looking for long-term relationships*
*Source: Bustle, The Guardian
I know, I was shocked to read this as well. To me, it seemed like a PR stunt. So I decided to test this claim as well and launch my own survey to see whether people truly want long-term relationships out of online dating.
Methodology
To remove bias, I signed up for Tinder, OKCupid, Bumble, and Coffee Meets Bagel and put my survey for strangers to fill out. I also posted this on Facebook for friends to share amongst their networks. I wanted to get a random sample size not just from my inner circle. I also threw in some other questions as well, to learn more about people’s dating experiences.
The Results!
I guess there is some truth to Tinder’s survey, because my data correlates with their results. 76% is a much higher number than I expected. Keep in mind, this survey included Tinder, OKCupid, Bumble and CoffeeMeetsBagel users as well. It’s also important to note that about half the people were looking for short-term relationships.
This is not a surprise but it’s good to validate a lot of the research I’ve been doing which revealed that communication is the #1 problem in dating.
I asked users to pick the one that was most painful to them. By a landslide it was conversation. I do believe that some of these factors are symptoms of underlying problems. For example, ghosting is probably a result of bad connection, matches, or conversation.
I asked people to just use adjectives to describe their conversations. It seemed that people had lots of engaging conversation but also had their equal share of awkward, boring, superficial conversational, with the occasional rude outburst.
This was really useful in gauging to see if other people (who hadn’t seen my prototypes) would be interested in conversational games and ice-breakers.
I was curious if people wanted to add richer interactions like voice or video. Only a small fraction was interested in it, and not everyone that voted for voice voted for video. It was definitely scattered.
I expected higher usage rates but dating app fatigue is something that’s occurring since 2014, there’s been a drop-off in app usage.
This data is pretty varied and in hindsight, I should of used more descriptive term for “once in awhile”. I imagine that’s a few times a month?
Trust levels are higher than expected! I think this has a lot to do with the Facebook and social media integration in many of these apps.
People are on the fence on whether online dating will work for them.
Higher than expected! This tells me people are pretty good at talking about themselves, granted that the ice has been broken 😉.
This is also promising. I wondered if people had considered who it is they were looking for which is part of the problem. It seems that people have a good idea but they just need a bit more help finding those folks.
I wanted to see how much assistance people want in this process. It was less than expected, I guess it depends on what kind of advice. I admit, this questions was very broad but it was still good to gauge people’s reactions to the possibility of a dating AI assistant.
Just for some context on who filled out this survey.
What does this all mean?
Very broadly, what this tells us is that people are seeking meaningful connection and long-term relationships. Eventually this whole dating game gets old and we all want to something more secure in the long run.
Big thank you!
If you’d like to learn more details about the results, feel free to reach out. But I wanted to thank everyone here for participating and helping contribute to my research. This information is definitely going to guide me when prototyping a new dating experience for ya’ll.
