A Better Dating App Experience
An exemplary exploration into the addictive patterns used by dating apps and how to develop an ethical alternative.
Scope
In the graduate course The Psychology of User Experience, we were tasked with evaluating a particular product or platform to determine how it uses (or abuses) human psychology to drive success. My final project explored the dating app Hinge to discover where it falls short by failing to live up to its users expectations. The project also included potential solutions and a corresponding mockup or wireframe for each one.
Psychology at Play
One of the most interesting courses in my graduate program, this class centered around the psychology of user experience and how to create ethical designs.
For my final presentation, I chose to analyze the addictive patterns dating apps frequently employ, and invent solutions that would allow these apps to treat their users more ethically while still succeeding as a business.
Taglines Shmaglines
In order to narrow my scope, I chose to focus on Hinge, the one popular dating app that claims to be “designed to be deleted”, if you believe their tagline.
As a Daily Active User (DAU) at the time of this assignment, I was already suspicious, and it didn’t take long before I was able to conclude that, while Hinge was using fewer unethical/addictive systems than their competitors, they still had a significant amount of ground to to cover before they could legitimately say they were “designed for deletion”.
More Money, More Problems
The business challenges plaguing Hinge aren’t unique to their space - VC firms and shareholders constantly in search of “the next best thing” value Daily Active Users above almost every other metric because active users = revenue.
My solutions had to center around my hypothesis that dating app users should not be viewed through this metric because their relationship with dating apps will inherently take long breaks as they go in and out of relationships. Using it daily goes against a users ability to find a relationship through the app because that frequent use pulls users out of their budding relationship back towards the addictive and unproductive patterns of the apps matchmaking process.
Finding A Way Out
With my hypothesis in mind, I came up with a mini-rubric for deciding whether a hypothetical solution was both ethical and viable. The criteria centered around 3 values that a dating app company would have to adopt in order to adhere to an ethical code of design.
Encourage Deeper Connections: Most dating apps prioritize quantity over quality regarding the number of likes and matches you receive. This leads to either addiction or disillusionment for users as they fail to achieve their user goal - finding a partner.
Avoiding Addictive Patterns: Variable ratio reinforcement scheduling is an addictive pattern rampant across all dating apps, playing across users’ insecurity and desperation to provide dopamine hits with little to no real world value.
Building Trust through Transparency: The other “mystery” frustrating users (particularly men) is how the algorithm for generating “compatibility” actually works. The Hinge app provides minimal solutions that essentially say a whole lot of nothing. While still recognizing the importance of algorithm propriety, being more transparent with users - and speaking to them with language that doesn’t require a Graduate degree in statistics - will build trust with users that will motivate them to continue using the app breakup after breakup after breakup (until they find their person…hopefully without too much heartbreak in between).