UX Innovation in Modern Dating

Lindsay Norman at UXDX USA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJMHKEHyUHY

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

The dating app designed to be deleted

[00:00:01] Hi everyone, my name is Lindsay Norman and I lead the design team at Hinge, and today we're going to be talking about the unique challenges of designing for modern dating.

[00:00:13] For those of you who are unfamiliar with Hinge, we call ourselves the dating app that is designed to be deleted. What this means is we genuinely want to get people off the app and into relationships. If you think about it, the best marketing is real couples in the world saying that they actually met through Hinge. So we want to get people off the app on real dates, and we're really designed for intentional daters, people who are looking for a real connection and don't want just a one night stand.

[00:00:45] I want to take you back to 2013, when dating apps really first came onto the scene in a big mobile way. You'll probably remember that at the time most of these apps were designed with this swiping gesture in mind, so you swipe through people pretty quickly. What the swiping gesture did is it really optimized for volume and speed, so you could get through a ton of people fast, but you weren't always sure who you were looking at. When Hinge knew that we really wanted to differentiate, we thought about how to improve this experience of going through people really quickly.

[00:01:23] Another thing that we did is we took a look at how users were describing themselves on these apps. What most of the apps did was they gave users just this blank box that said "about me," and it was really up to the person to figure out how to describe who they were, what they were looking for, and it was pretty intimidating at the time. Obviously this still exists in apps today, but what Hinge did is they looked at this and asked, how can we make this an easier experience for someone to describe who they are? It's really difficult for us to put in a few sentences what we're all about.

[00:02:04] When Hinge came onto the scene, they took the really bold move of saying we're going to move away from swiping gestures, we're going to move towards this longer profile that really ensures that someone has the time and space to describe what they're about. What Hinge did is it said you had to upload six photos of yourself and you had to fill out three of these prompts.

[00:02:29] Now the prompt is similar to that blank box, but instead of saying "about me," we give the users hundreds of questions that they can answer. So in this case, "I'm weirdly attracted to," and then it's the user who gets to really fill in the blank here: "people who don't have social media accounts." From a design standpoint this was really huge. It was just one tweak to the box, where now we've given you a question to answer, and it really unlocked people.

The power of the prompt

[00:02:58] Today you'll hear me talk about how something as simple as starting with a box and then giving users something to work with, really guiding them to explain what they're about or what kind of date they're looking for. "Together we could." This could also say "the weirdest thing about me." Giving users that blank box that they can fill in is really powerful.

[00:03:23] Today I'll talk a little bit about just the power of the prompt, and how you can take the same question, "together we could," and when you start scaling it up you now have hundreds of thousands of answers to this question that allow the viewer to really understand how is this person different from this person, and how are the dates that they want to do going to differ. Now as the viewer you really start to understand the differences in these people, which is essentially what is required for you to understand who to go on a date with. You really need to know one person from another to figure out if you're going to have chemistry.

[00:04:04] Another thing that prompts really allowed us to do is stay closer to what was happening in the real world. When Covid hit and everyone was dating from home, what we did was we introduced a lot of prompts that spoke to how are you going to date now that you're stuck at home. Do you want to do video dates? Do you want to go on a walk in the park with masks? There are all these new considerations for dating that people had to consider for the first time.

[00:04:32] Now a couple of years after Covid came out, daters care a lot more about mental health. Everyone has been at home reflecting, a lot of people starting therapy for the first time, and so prompts allow us to speak to what daters now care about. We just recently introduced a new prompt pack all around self-care and mental health.

Applying the prompt to photos

[00:04:59] What we did was we really created prompts to help people express who they are and what they care about. But as we were figuring out where do we want to take profiles in the future, we started looking at these photos, and what we realized is we kind of had a similar problem with the type of photos people were uploading to Hinge. It was almost like people had figured out the recipe to the Hinge profile, and suddenly all these profile pics started feeling the same. This challenge of how do you really bring out the person in a 2D profile on a screen was a challenge that we spent a lot of time brainstorming and figuring out what was it going to take to help people get to more authentic profiles.

[00:05:46] What we started noticing is that a lot of people had these headshots, and that was great for the first photo in a profile, but we really wanted to nudge people towards photos of them just out in the world doing more authentic things. If you're going on a date with this person and you pull up to their house, how are they going to feel just on a random Wednesday night? This headshot is obviously everyone's best self, most polished self, but we wanted people to feel really comfortable expressing themselves in their authentic nature.

[00:06:22] This idea of using the prompt to nudge people towards that more authentic profile, we applied it to photos. That same girl from before, this is her out in the wild, which is a prompt that we have that's helping to make people feel comfortable sharing what their weekends look like. If you're dating Julia on a Saturday she might be dancing in Bushwick, and that's going to be a much more accurate representation of what she's going to be like in person.

[00:06:52] The cool thing is that same prompt, "me in the wild," if you look at my friend Chris, is going to look very different. Chris is someone who loves to be in museums and is super artistic. You can see how just applying a prompt to a photo gives people permission to be who they are and not just upload the fancy headshots, but instead feel empowered to share what really makes them them.

The four biggest user pain points

[00:07:21] We were really excited about this progress, but we continued to ask what's going to be next. Profile photos, great, but we really wanted to nudge people towards richer, more accurate representations of who they were. So we did what any design team does best and we rooted ourselves in what are our users' biggest pain points.

[00:07:45] At the time we knew from a couple of years of research that people's biggest challenges on Hinge could be broken down into these four things. The first was efficiency, and this is a problem with all dating apps, but you spend so much time going through profiles looking at different people's answers, and then so few of those matches will actually turn into a date, so it's a bit of a slow process.

[00:08:12] There's also a signal problem, and this is the problem I've been talking about so far, which is that it's really hard to know what someone's personality is like through a few photos and a few prompts. We also know, and this is still an issue today, that responsiveness is a huge problem. People spending all the time matching only to end up in a chat with someone where no one is saying anything: huge problem for a lot of dating apps. And finally people telling us, I'm just unhappy with the dating pool, the people I see and discover, they're not people that I feel like I'm going to connect with or have a lot of chemistry with.

[00:08:53] We really honed in on this specific insight, which is that 75% of our user base, which is such a huge number, said it was really hard to gauge chemistry. They were on the app looking at people but they really didn't know if they were going to enjoy someone on the actual date. In order for our team to figure out how do we do this better on our app, we actually had to stop and figure out what does chemistry between two people look like, in real life as well as in a dating app context.

[00:09:26] Our amazing research team doubled down on this question of what does chemistry come down to, and they figured out that chemistry really related to three different things. It was about having positive experiences together. It was about having similarities, and a lot of apps think of similarities in terms of we have similar hobbies, maybe we have the same taste in music. Turns out that does not relate to long-term compatibility. If anything, sometimes those similarities can be a distraction. Just because someone doesn't like your music taste doesn't mean that you guys can't be really amazing partners.

[00:10:05] But the third thing that we learned was that it was this idea of synchronicity that really builds chemistry, makes two people feel chemistry. This idea of hearing someone, maybe how you react to them laughing, those things were really exciting to us. I think we saw this as the biggest challenge for our team: if we can do a better job incorporating this idea of synchronicity into our app, maybe two people would feel that chemistry and be inspired to actually go on that date.

Choosing voice over video

[00:10:41] At the time, and this was about a year and a half ago, we really felt like we had two paths forward. We could either double down on video as the next frontier for dating apps, or we could play around with this idea of voice. Through our initial research what we realized was that video felt like a really high bar for people, not being used to having videos on dating apps. People really felt like you can't really hide from a video. It's what you look like, it's who you are, and people are really used to uploading their best pictures on dating apps and really being able to curate what that image is. We felt early on that video might not be the thing to go for quite yet, might be something that comes a bit later. So we were excited to pursue voice.

[00:11:34] As a design team we got together and we were trying to figure out what's the right way to package voice. Early on we thought maybe voice was just going to be about introducing yourself on your profile, so saying "hi, my name is Lindsay, welcome to my profile." We quickly realized that a lot of those ideas were just going to be awkward for people, and that if voice was going to work we really needed to give people something clear to say and something that they could work with.

What research said about people's own voices

[00:12:03] We took a lot of ideas to research and we had people break down what was confusing, what they didn't like. We got a lot of good feedback early on. I really want to highlight that throughout this entire research process, which went on probably half a year, over and over people told us, I am not comfortable with the sound of my own voice. A lot of us can relate to that. But what they did say was they gave us this positive affirmation that they would love to hear it in someone else's profile, they just weren't going to be comfortable doing it themselves.

[00:12:40] That's a really unique design challenge, when people are telling you yes, I'd love to view it on profiles, that would be really interesting, but I myself won't do it. We as a team really understood that in order for this to work, what we're going to need to do is make voice seem super approachable and use design to lower the barrier as much as we can to people trying this once.

[00:13:06] A lot of people told us similar things to this: you have to be so vulnerable online putting up photos; also, no other app has made me add voice, so why would I do it? As a designer, when you keep hearing this question, why would I do it, why would I do it, you know that something has to change in the design, because that value prop has to be immediately clear for people. Especially in the context of dating, where people are already coming with so much fear and insecurity, you need to make this thing feel worth their time, because no one's quite willing to put themselves out there if they're not sure what they're going to get in return.

The engineering handoff that sent us back to Figma

[00:13:47] I'd love to talk about just this quick anecdote, which is that as we were exploring voice we got to the point where the designs were done. As a design team we were finished with our end, we had the flows all spec'd out. I'll never forget my designer and I sitting in that engineering handoff with one of our great engineers, Saul, and we were ready to just hand it over. We've thought of everything, it's done.

[00:14:15] What we had presented at the time was this idea of let's just take the prompts that exist today and for the first time give people the opportunity to record their answers rather than type them out. What users were going to have to do is they were going to take one of their prompts they've already written and we're going to nudge them to try to record it for the first time. We thought this was a good solution, just adding that optionality.

[00:14:40] But as our engineers started poking and poking on the designs, we realized it was actually going to be quite confusing for users, because now they had to make the choice whether they wanted to delete a written answer and record it for the first time, and it created a lot of complications with things like, do you delete your previously written recording, what happens if you don't like the sound of your recording. What we realized as designers was that we had actually presented too many decisions for the user to make. It just wasn't simple enough. So we ended up telling our engineer, you're absolutely right, we didn't think of a lot of this, let's pause, go back to Figma, try and work some of these issues out.

[00:15:24] Where we ended up was, rather than combine these things all together, we made the decision to really pull out voice prompts into its own section, which made the designs much more clear and intuitive for users. It even enabled us to come up with voice-specific prompts, things like "my best impressions" or "guess this tune." Separating it out allowed us to create this own little world for voice where we could fully explain the value prop and not overcomplicate the system.

Squeezing the sample answer into the MVP

[00:15:58] Another fun little story is that one of the hardest parts of design is often those conversations around what's going to go in the MVP. We all know the crazy debates that happen about what's important, what's not important. We were down to the last minute, the MVP was going to ship, and last minute the design team felt like we really needed a sample answer. We needed someone to hear just a normal person doing a voice prompt, so that everyone else could feel like you don't need to sound like a news anchor, you don't need to sound sexy, you just need to have your normal voice and answer a question.

[00:16:37] This was something that was not going to make it into the MVP, but I felt strongly enough, the design team felt strongly enough, that I ran over to one of my engineers' houses and ended up recording like 10 of these in his room. It was quite awkward. I didn't come up with anything great, but I came up with something, and we got it in the MVP, and I'm really glad we did. Because it was one of those things where after we did a bunch of research, once we went out with this, people told us that sample answer really made me feel comfortable doing this for the first time, because I realized you just want us to record our voice, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. So I'm glad we squeezed that in last minute.

Launching voice prompts

[00:17:20] Then came the day when we introduced voice prompts, and it was really exciting to get together and figure out how we wanted to package this for the first time. We workshopped every single word. We talked a lot about what is that CTA going to be. We ended up with something really non-committal, "check it out." Sometimes those non-committal CTAs are really helpful, especially when you're trying to get people to do something that's going to be a bit scary. You probably wouldn't want to say "record now," or something that feels like they may not be ready in that moment to do.

[00:17:55] We went out and, god bless, our PR team did a great job getting the word out. It's fun to note that we had no idea how people were going to react to this new frontier of voice, but we were really excited that we had some publishers say that we had cracked audio. What was especially exciting is people understood why we were doing voice, this idea of synchronicity and you just not really getting a feel for someone through a static profile, and how voice can really bring someone to life and give you the idea of what it would be like to sit in a room with them. It was something that a lot of apps wanted to do, but the system of prompts is the thing that really allowed us to break into voice.

[00:18:44] And it did help that TikTok really got the word out there. We had kind of a viral moment with TikTok where unexpectedly people started recording the funniest voice prompts that they heard. Of course these were really extreme examples of people doing ridiculous impressions, but it was super helpful for us that it caught on and people thought it was really entertaining. We were all excited to see people say they were going to come back to Hinge just to listen to these. We saw a huge uptick in registrations, and we noticed that Gen Z especially was really taking to the idea of voice and really understood the value.

[00:19:26] A couple of things that really helped bring voice to life and make it a successful feature for us. The first was thinking about how we're going to introduce this feature and badge it and get it in front of people. Obviously with apps, a lot of times there's competing things you're trying to get users to do, so we were pretty ambitious with the badging and nudging people to add voice or try a voice prompt.

[00:19:54] We also made the decision that if you were someone who was going to add a voice prompt to your profile, that it would be above the fold and it would be that second slot in your profile right after the headshot, to make sure that people didn't miss it and we were really highlighting this new feature.

[00:20:12] The last thing is we used things like half sheets to meet the user where they were. Rather than nudge people to go into edit profile and take them all crazy places in the app, we decided to come to the user in Discover and say, hey, just do this thing really quickly. The nice thing about half sheets is that they make something that seems pretty intimidating feel a lot more light and quick. This half sheet was hugely successful in getting people to add a voice prompt for the first time.

What voice prompts did for all four pain points

[00:20:44] One of the most exciting things that we realized after launching voice was that when we looked at those key user pain points, we realized that in many ways voice prompts was touching on all of them. It was making it more efficient to understand who someone was, it was giving you more signal, it was helping with responsiveness, and it was also making people feel like maybe that person they weren't immediately attracted to just based on a photo was now going to be a really fun time, because the voice prompt featured their sense of humor, or how genuine they were, for the first time.

[00:21:23] I want to double down on this idea of responsiveness. If you think about the problem of people aren't chatting, we actually spent a ton of time, before really diving into voice prompts, in the world of chat. We knew that people weren't really having conversations, so we tried to really get people to engage by designing things in the chat, topics of conversation, or "hey, are you feeling stuck, you can talk about these things."

[00:21:53] What we realized is that if we actually started at the top of funnel, if we started with interesting profiles, then that was actually going to have hopefully an impact on what people were going to talk about in chat. If you're feeling really excited by someone because of their profile, we hoped you'd be more likely to have that conversation.

[00:22:14] We were actually right about this hypothesis. People who added a voice prompt to their profile were 17% more likely to get to a full conversation, and they also even got more likes from their profile. It's a good lesson that sometimes you get really honed in on the area where the problem is obvious, but starting top of funnel and just focusing on profiles really helped more people have better conversations.

[00:22:44] And those conversations are the things that get people on those dates. As I mentioned in the beginning of the talk, our north star is we want to get people off the app, out in the world, meeting. Voice was the thing that was engaging enough to really spark people's interest and get them on those dates.

Takeaways

[00:23:04] A key takeaway here is that power of the prompt. That was something that as a brand we fully owned, and it got people to go from that scary "about me," where no one could describe themselves, to being able to better articulate who they were and what they cared about.

[00:23:22] We also applied a prompt to photos to get people to share more authentic versions of who they were: how they spend time, what their friend group looks like, moving people away from just a static headshot to something that feels more real.

[00:23:38] Then we used prompts and applied it to voice to get people to be more comfortable with something that they weren't comfortable with before. Again, many people told us, I'm not comfortable with voice, I won't do it. But we took this system of prompts that felt very familiar, paired it with something that was unfamiliar, and this really lowered the bar for people and got them to try it for the first time. This was a hugely successful feature for us, and we're really excited to figure out how to apply the same process and keep pushing dating.

[00:24:12] I wanted to tell the story of how we did this for voice because I think it was a really key moment for us breaking into a new frontier. That's all I have today, so I'd love to connect with you guys through email or Instagram, hear what you have to say, just grow my design network and friends and meet more people in the community. I hope this talk was helpful and interesting, and thank you so much for the time.