Having a chat with my friend Jude while looking for a knob for her dresser on Portobello Road, we were catching up and we started talking about internet dating. Since I’ve been out of that loop and kindof stuck in the IDII bubble for so long, I wanted to know more. When I was in Montreal 2 years ago, internet dating was something you talked about in a half-apologetic hushed voice over coffee with your friends on a cold winter afternoon, so I was interested to know what a 28 year old working professional in London thought of the scene.
She’s been using Guardian Soulmates for a few dates. I thought it was interesting that in a way reading the Guardian and therefore using that particular dating site, you’re also making a political and social statement as to who you’d like to meet.
The homepage boasts: “Soulmates is a unique service so you can be sure that you will be part of a group of like-minded people” so already I guess you’re talking to people with similar political views although i pointed out to her that this wasn’t necessarily something that was a given seeing as you don’t have to prove to the site that you read the Guardian… although that would be funni, to have a secret question that you could only find in the Guardian as a security question to have access to the site…: )
Anyway, she’s been on a little more than 5 dates with different types of men and these are some of the things that she mentioned which could perhaps lead the design of better online dating services:
– The pictures posted are completely inaccurate, some men post pictures at weird angles, old pictures when they were younger and more athletic, the level of accuracy plays a lot on whether a woman will choose to meet someone in real life, so why delay the reaction? Let’s be honest here, men expect us to look great at any time and to show it all, why can’t men do the same? Maybe this could lead to using people’s webcams or cellphones… ie take a picture of yourself now and send it within the next 3 mns to this email adress or phone number…
– She ended up meeting people with completely different objectives, so what someone is actually interested in is something that needs granularity… check boxes are boring… “im looking to someone to write to” defines nothing at all and “let’s see what happens” sounds more like “let’s see what you are like in real life and then we’ll decide”… sigh… clarity is king!
– Jude actually met other women who were on the network as well and they started chatting about the men they met and quickly realized that they had actually dated the same men and so started discussing them and giving each other advice. Is there opportunity here for a community-aspect to this online dating thing… reputation? commenting? how many people on the network has that person “favorite”? I’m sure there have to be design opportunities here. Just like life…
So of course after this conversation I really had to give this thing a try, and see what the online interactions were. I really enjoy reading the Guardian and I think they’ve done a really nice job for their website recently but this was ridiculous…I really felt like i was filling in a shopping list of requirements and personal criteria. People don’t post up that many details about themselves and they’re actually little that would make you choose between one guy or the next apart from the picture! And of course this comes back to my first point…accuracy is key. The navigation is very poor and to be honest, information like “so and so is a 85% match” with blue ticks next to each item of the shopping list are really not helpful. The only items which seem to translate what a person is like are the photos, the voice message (but what exactly does one record on these…”testing one 2 one 2, this is my voice”?) and the personal rant entitled “why i would be a good pick”… there’s so much missing here…
So I think what I’ll do is stay on this service and use it as user research if i should ever actually find someone to go out for coffee with. I think it would be a great design exercise for the Guardian to reconsider this service and actually design it properly. They could actually become innovative in their supposed desire to “bring like-minded people together”.
Oh my god, I just saw the profile of someone i know! Gulp!