Resilient Dating
Empowering new Hinge users facing rejection
This project was completed during General Assembly’s User Experience Design Course (November 2020 - February 2021). While I initially identified ghosting as a problem in online dating, my assumptions were challenged by in-depth interviews with nine dating app users.
I discovered that newer users had a negative view of ghosting and took rejection personally, which could lead them to stop using certain apps or to quit online dating all together. Meanwhile, long-time users had a resiliency to rejection and saw ghosting as a positive experience compared to other types of rejection. Based on these findings, I created a fun, interactive mobile app prototype empowering Hinge users to handle rejection with resiliency and empathy.
Deliverables
Research
Problem Statement
User Interviews
Business Analysis
Affinity Statements
User Personas
Journey Mapping
Design
Wireframes
Task Flows
User Flows
Prototyping
Design System
Usability Testing
Although I shifted my focus from inhibiting ghosting, I initially mapped out a feature to report that a user had ghosted.
At the start of the course, we were asked to choose a problem space that didn’t affect us personally.
I immediately thought of a recent conversation with a friend. She was a frustrated single who struggled to meet potential romantic partners “in real life” in her mid-sized Northeast city. However, she had heard so many horror stories about ghosting that she was too spooked to try online dating.
I realized I had found my problem.
Business Analysis
As someone with 10 years experience in e-commerce customer experience and marketing, this struck me as a thorny business obstacle. Dating apps have a high customer acquisition cost for paid subscriptions ($189.82 per customer in 2018). Meanwhile, the conversion rate from a free (or freemium) user to paid subscriber is less than 2%. For the big dating apps that aren’t focused on a niche market, keeping paid subscribers locked in means maintaining a huge pool of attractive and single free/freemium users. They also need plenty of new faces cycling in, so longer-term users don’t run out of matches and switch to another app.
The interesting thing about most dating apps is that attrition is required for success.
In theory, dating apps want users to get into relationships and stop using their service. They are marketing their own obsolescence. After all, Hinge’s slogan is “Designed to be Deleted.”
However, attrition due to unsavory user behavior is bad for both business and romance. If users accrue negative experiences on a particular app, they’ll stop using it. They’ll also share this with their friends, driving away potential new users.
This begs the question: While dating apps can’t control the offline behavior of users, should they offer more control of the in-app experience?
Certainly, some apps have tried to alleviate the negative aspects of modern dating through design choices. Bumble famously restricts men from sending the first message to women. Many limit how many swipes or likes free users can deploy in a day. Most companies no longer allow users to send photos through their in-app messaging service, preventing the dreaded unsolicited dick pic. But, I wondered, is there some change to the design or algorithm that could appreciably inhibit ghosting?
So, what is ghosting?
Ask ten different people what ghosting is and you’ll get ten different answers. Trust me, I did!
For this project, I conducted nine in-depth interviews with dating app users ranging in age from mid-20s to 50s. I also had an illuminating conversation with relationship coach and dating app consultant Steve Dean.
I learned that people need to emotionally invest in an interaction before they will label a sudden silence ‘ghosting’. A conversation might end abruptly, but if you’re not invested then it just doesn’t feel like ghosting. It might even be a relief (a.k.a. mutual ghosting).
When creating an affinity map, I realized the factor that most correlated with how users experience ghosting was the length of time they had used dating apps. Short-term users (3 years or less) described investing early on, even before meeting in person. Long-term users (7+ years) described investing much later in the process, usually after multiple dates.
The Psychology of Ghosting
Newer users expressed a strong desire for closure when rejected by a dating match. They were more likely to want an explanation and specific reasons. They reported feeling discouraged after repeated ambiguous rejections. These experiences contribute to attrition as newer users described abandoning certain apps, taking breaks from using dating apps and even giving up on online dating entirely. They viewed ghosting negatively and reported self-criticism after ambiguous rejection including feeling:
Unattractive
Unconfident
Anxious
Long-term users viewed ghosting more positively as it told them when to move on. They were more likely to express that they did not owe (and were not owed) explanations for rejections early on in a relationship. One user described being ghosted as “a kindness” compared to critical explanations focused on their behavior, appearance or personality. They also tended to avoid specifics when rejecting others, instead focusing on misaligned goals and interests or a lack of romantic compatibility.
Why people ghost
When I presented my project to my instructors and classmates at General Assembly, one finding in particular took many by surprise. It had also run counter to my own assumptions about ghosting and ultimately led to changing the focus of my mobile app prototype.
People who date men are the most likely to ghost.
Regardless of their own gender identity, all of the users I interviewed who dated men had ghosted. Of the users I spoke to who dated women, only one disclosed ghosting (in fact, he described himself as a “serial ghoster” due to the large amount of attention he received from women—and he ultimately stopped using apps because he felt bad about his behavior).
The number one reason people reported ghosting others—and why they were primarily ghosting men—is because they had very negative—even frightening—experiences that left them feeling disrespected and sometimes physically unsafe. Users reported aggressive sexual behavior, verbal insults and inappropriate comments as reasons they had ghosted. It is also notable that people who ghosted men for behaving in these ways did not express remorse or regret for doing so. In contrast, the users I interviewed who date women did not report encountering this kind of behavior from their matches.
Unintended Consequences
With this in mind, I realized I had an ethical dilemma on my hands. I had initially planned to create a feature that allowed users to report user accounts that had ghosted them. My thinking was that the matching algorithms under the hood of dating apps could be harnessed to keep newer users away from users who ghosted frequently. Serial ghosters could be matched with each other, first, before being shown matches who had little to no reports of ghosting other users.
This, I thought, would give newer users more time to develop resilience to rejection and improve user retention. I then spoke with a mobile app engineer who confirmed that while it was technically feasible, there could be unintended consequences. After analyzing the user interviews, I realized that users who date men would be the most impacted by such a change, because they are also the users most likely to ghost due to negative and/or unsafe experiences with their matches. It seemed likely that changes to the algorithm based on reports of user ghosting would penalize users who had to deal with toxic masculinity among their potential matches.
Yasmin is one of three personas created from user interviews.
Stumped on what to do next, I returned to Yasmin, the main user persona I was designing for. Yasmin is a newer user who dates men. She strongly desires closure from rejection and struggles with self-criticism and anxiety when ghosted. From a business perspective, she is an attrition risk due to negative experiences with other users. If an app couldn’t stop Yasmin from being ghosted, was there something it could do to help her feel empowered in the face of ambiguous rejections?
Advice from a Relationship Coach
I also revisited the notes I had taken when talking to Steve Dean, a relationship coach and dating app consultant. He was an advisor at OKCupid and has compelling ideas about networking, relationships and the similarities between job hunting and dating.
Steve described dating apps as “flooding the zone” with potential matches, overwhelming users who may end up ghosting and exiting interactions as new matches are presented. He also notes that the cost of rejecting strangers via a dating app is “extraordinarily low” as there is little accountability. He felt that many dating apps fall short in educating new users and setting realistic expectations about the user experience.
After our talk, I was even more convinced that trying to inhibit ghosting via in-app design changes would backfire, leading to a bad user experience and attrition. Steve pointed out that if users found their pool of potential matches decreased, or were forced to send a rejection message to users they were no longer interested in, they would leave for another app.
After talking with Steve, I considered the long-term dating app users I had interviewed. Like Steve, they held pragmatic views on dating. For the most part, they did not take an early rejection personally. Their self-confidence wasn’t tied to dating or romantic partners. They expressed enjoyment with many aspects of being single and were focused on activities outside of dating, like their career, social life or passion projects. While they were open to finding love and partnerships, they also enjoyed casual dating relationships. All of this seemed to build their resilience to rejection.
Switching Focus
Based on the user interviews and chat with Steve Dean, I changed my problem space from inhibiting ghosting to helping new users navigate rejection. This includes resilience to being rejected as well as rejecting others with respect and kindness.
While the newer dating app users I interviewed experienced more self-critical thoughts after an ambiguous rejection than the long-term users, both groups appreciated an empathetic rejection. One long-term user told me she was so impressed with a kind and thoughtful rejection message she had received from one of her dates, she saved the text and used it repeatedly when she was rejecting others.
Inspired by empathetic rejections shared by long-term dating app users, I created prompts that users could copy or modify when telling someone they were no longer interested.
Decisions, Decisions…
I used Miro to create a user flow that became the basis of the interactive quiz in my final prototype.
By answering a series of questions, users can determine which ambiguous dating phenomena they are encountering and how to respond. It was also a fun way to define some modern dating slang like orbiting and breadcrumbing.
An early wireframe of the assessment quiz included in the high-fidelity prototype, created in Miro.
A Working Prototype
For the conclusion of the User Experience Design course, I created an interactive high-fidelity dating app prototype based on the Hinge interface and presented it to my class.
After finishing the first version of the high-fidelity prototype, I was feeling like a hot shot. User testing quickly showed I was not.
Using Maze, I set up two rounds of unmoderated user testing. The first round had eight participants, the second had six. During the first round, only 45% of users had direct success in completing all the tasks.
Heat maps showed wild clicking all over the prototype. Turns out a star in the right hand corner is a bad icon choice for indicating a menu. So, I changed it to grey button labeled “Options” in the second round of testing, increasing click throughs by 33%. After more tweaks and better labeling of buttons, I brought the direct success rate of all tasks up to 76% and decreased the bounce rate by two percentage points. It wasn’t perfect, but it was useable.
After the second round of unmoderated test results, I continued to update and iterate on the prototype. Eventually, I had to stop so I could present it to my class. It was a great lesson in learning to let go of a product.
Piggybacking on the existing “Have You Met” feature, users can report whether or not they have met a user named Sammy, assess how their interaction with Sammy is going via the “Define the Situation” quiz and uncover an easter egg educational feature with tips on how to empathetically tell someone you are no longer interested.
CLICK THE SCREEN TO PLAY WITH THE PROTOTYPE
Final Thoughts
Designing a prototype that exists within Hinge was an exciting challenge. Hinge has a great interface and aesthetic. I learned a lot about visual design through recreating the app. However, I don’t think the app fully supports its user base.
The company’s brand slogan “designed to be deleted” pushes the assumption that its users are looking for long-term monogamous relationships. The marketing is effective: Hinge certainly had a reputation as the “serious” dating app among the people I interviewed even if they continued to use it when they were looking for, or open to, casual relationships.
My research revealed that Hinge users are heterogeneous and diverse in their relationship wants, needs and practices. Even if Hinge isn’t viewed as a “hook up” app like Tinder, hook-ups still happen between users. Yet, there isn’t an option to define the range and type of relationship(s) a user is looking for, whether short or long-term, casual or serious, monogamous or non-monogamous. The profiles are image-driven and based on a limited number of playful prompts with little space or encouragement for users to talk about their values, relationship style or long-term plans.
Ultimately, I believe this leads to misunderstandings and disappointment, especially among new users who have seen the advertisements and assume Hinge caters to people exclusively looking for a serious, long-term relationship. While OKCupid has something of a reputation as a polyamorous and kink app, I think it does the best job out of all the major dating apps in helping users state their relationship preferences, intentions, desires and boundaries (regardless of how vanilla these may be).
If I could do it all over again, I would design an app for dating with intention. I would love to test some of the concepts Steve Dean mentioned, including developing metrics for user intent and relationship alignment, fostering accountability by integrating accounts within a user’s social networks and setting clearer, data-driven user expectations about things like response rates to messages. I would also offer more educational features to help users create good profiles and engaging messages.
Additionally, I would conduct more user interviews to explore what people are looking for in different relationship types from serious to casual, monogamous to polyamorous. I would test limiting the number of matches a user can have simultaneously to reduce overwhelm and increase attention. I would also set up A/B tests to see if requiring users to send a rejection message when un-matching from other people really does cause attrition. Finally, I would give users prompts and space to describe what they are looking for in relationships, or even to be honest about not quite knowing.