How Does Match Make Dating Easier?

Behavior change is hard. Actively changing another person's behavior is even harder. But there are plenty of companies out there that have been able to crack that code. They understand that people don't always or even rarely act rationally. I'm Kristen Berman, co founder of Irrational Labs. Over the years, we've helped countless companies understand and leverage behavioral science to increase the health, wealth and happiness of their users. The idea behind the Science of Change was to create a podcast that demystifies the psychology of decision making. So here's how it works. Each week I get to chat with visionary product and organizational leaders to uncover their insights about user behavior and how they've managed to change it. I match this up with some of the latest research in the field to get to the bottom of our core psychologies. So let's dive in and unlock the secrets behind the Science of Change. The Science of Podcast is presented by Setsale, the world's number one revenue execution platform. Today, I'm talking to a pair of product leaders who are making it their mission to simplify one of the most complicated human endeavors that exists. Finding Love. Jin Chua and Matt Gray are both with Match. Jin is a senior UX researcher and Matt is the VP of Product and they have a pretty hard gig. How do you make dating easier? Well, match.com has been at it since 1995 and they have learned a lot. It's hard to argue with nearly 22 million users, a number that is actually still growing, which tells you that they have figured something out. Jin, Matt and I touched on everything from the do's and don'ts of creating a profile, to common browsing habits to how differently men and women approach finding a match. So let's dive right into that dating pool, shall we? So let's actually hop right in and think about probably what's top of mind for most online daters, which is the profile. So as we think about how one presents themselves on online dating, how you present your profile is a reflection of yourself. Or is it? And so we'd love to get your advice to people who are on Match for how they should think about setting up their profile. What have you learned?

The way we have designed our profiles are really meant to encourage self disclosure and deeper connections. So if you look at our profile fields, we don't just have the standard demographics like height or age. We also include things like a 4000 character long summary where people can talk about themselves, we have topics where people can address how they feel, we have interests. We also have a feel for what is your Ideal first date. So really, all of these design affordances are meant to help people, to encourage self disclosure, encourage deeper connections.

I know, I know, I'm interrupting already. But this is literally the basis of Match.com's entire model. Everything starts with the profile. And we know from research that a certain type of information is more likely to increase feelings of connection between strangers. For example, sharing private or even sensitive personal information with someone is known to quickly increase intimacy in a relationship. It signals that we're willing to be vulnerable with the other person, which is a distinct marker of trust and commitment in a relationship. But their profiles also fall into the same trap that other platforms do. They allow us to set up initial filters that may unintentionally limit our pool. For example, Bumble just released some data that shows how much we limit our pool based on height. If you're a male under 6ft tall, fewer women will see your profile because the onboarding flow allows women to filter out shorter men. In fact, one stat suggests that because of these height filters, 90% of women end up looking for 6% of the men. So while Match.com's profile includes way more text than other platforms to encourage connection, it doesn't escape the big trap of profiles, which is allowing users to unintentionally limit their pool too early.

I think we can start by also talking about what not to put into their profiles. There are some anti patterns that we both hear. We see ourselves and we hear users complain about. And while we haven't exhaustively quantified just how bad each one of these, like, some of the common anti patterns we see are things like shirtless selfies, sunglasses, photos, having only photos of your friends and none of just yourself. No clear face picture, terrible lighting, terrible composition. You know, you kind of could sum that up to say, like, good photography, but it's harder than it sounds for a lot of folks, especially who aren't great at like, depicting themselves. And we do actually help users to make their profiles better using our expert service, who are trained in being dating experts and who review dozens of profiles a week and help to improve them.

Wow. So this is like the professional friend. You know, we all ask our friends to look at our profile and this is the expert friend who's coming in. Do people follow the advice? So, so if you were to say, Kristen, you really need to improve your lighting, is this something that folks are taking your advice on or do they really need maybe the friend nudge?

Yeah. So while we haven't ruthlessly quantified every piece of Advice we get that every expert provides. We do see extremely good results. After expert engagements, users who are engaging with experts are getting more likes, are getting more conversations started, and as a result going on more dates. That's pretty categorically true. And because we know this, they're having such great outcomes. We're obviously trying to get more folks in front of experts and find ways to scale that.

If we think about that 4,000 word summary, what are things that people should be including in that when they describe themselves and is longer, just fundamentally better?

Yeah, you know, I think what is really successful is a combination of revealing your true authentic self. And of course that's going to look very different from person to person, because everybody's different. But I think what seems to appeal to people is a sense of humor, but also a sense of seriousness and commitment to looking for something real, some description of their lifestyle, their interests. I think something that's more meaningful, that feels like you are reading about a person and trying to and anything that helps two people gauge if they can get along with each other or not.

So this begs the question, just how accurate are our online profiles? It's not a surprise that the information and photos people present in their profiles are aren't always entirely accurate. One reason could be that we're just biased when we represent ourselves in any situation. But a more accurate way to characterize this is that we choose to present ourselves strategically. We highlight the goods, ignore the bads, and sometimes modify information here and there to make us look better. Who hasn't taken off a few pounds on your driver's license? I know, I'm guilty. There's a study that analyzed the profiles of more than 20,000 users on a dating site and compared the data in the profiles with the national averages for those same characteristics. Dating site users present themselves as taller than the national average in terms of weight. Women in their 20s reported weighing on average more than 5 pounds less than the national average. And women in their 50s reported 23 pounds less. So people aren't always as they seem in their profiles, at least when it comes to physical appearance. But how much does that matter? We'll get more into that later. So when we think about online dating, one of the problems is just getting started. You know, if you're trying to either get back out there or start looking for the one, it is about getting started. So maybe you could talk about how the onboarding for Match works and what you've learned in this process.

Yeah. Since we're trying to attract users who have a high Intent to start a romantic relationship. It's something that they're taking very seriously. It's a very human and personal problem. Those users might find our longer onboarding helpful. They know that all users are going through that process and the information that they're providing through that process will make it easier for them to find someone who is a great match with a similar intent to enter into a relationship. You know, for instance, if you just have a few short sentences of text and one photo, who you are letting in the door is a different type of person than those who are willing to fill out a full profile. In fact, we've seen really incredible results from something we released. I think it was like a year ago. We call it 3 3. It's a strong insistence within onboarding to ask users to put a minimum of three photos and three topics. And once we released this, we saw a huge uptick in all sorts of profile centric metrics that measure the quality of the profile. So there's, you have people who view the profile and then like it, then there's, well, the profile is doing work for you, it's sustaining conversation. So it's the profiles leading quickly to in person dates, you know, within seven days. We saw that go up quite a bit as well. And so you think that like adding more steps to onboarding would actually be, you know, add tedium. But it counterintuitively adds value if you do it. Well.

I think this is a struggle that a lot of teams have to decide is how many steps should you be adding. And the trade off being people get tired, they drop off. So did you also see that maybe like folks kind of don't have three pictures right away and so can't complete the onboarding. How did you manage that trade off?

Yeah, so I mean, there is definitely a trade off there. As you add more steps to onboarding, you see a lower conversion rate to completing onboarding. But the people, you know, if in this, in this last example with the three plus three, when you see a higher quality user coming out of the onboarding, the effect that they have on the rest of the ecosystem might be positive enough to justify that lower conversion rate. So we try to normalize everything in terms of the net positive effect on the ecosystem. And you can do that. I mean, our North Star as a team is trying to drive the volume of great dates higher. And so if we're driving great dates higher, that leads to greater word of mouth, that leads to people coming back in the top of the funnel. It creates a virtuous effect that we want to celebrate. And so you have to take a long term view of it. And we do that by focusing on great dates.

Yeah.

To add to Matt's point about having this more extended onboarding process, what we see is that people generally, they amend their own profiles based on the profiles they see. Right. And so by having more high quality profiles, that encourages people to produce also more high quality, more authentic, richer profiles. So it's really that virtuous positive effect we're trying to create here.

I love that you're, you're using norms in the platform to help people behave a little bit better and help themselves. Of course. Right. Get, get a date.

Monkey see, monkey do in the best way.

Okay. So you've set up your profile, you've gone through onboarding, you're now in a sea of other humans that you could be talking to. How do people figure out who to pick given that there's so many options in this sea of, of single humans or people who are looking for something?

Yeah, so there, you're right, there are a sea of options. And we've heard from users that that can often be very overwhelming just when you're looking through profiles, just like the endless supply of them. And then for some of our users are quite popular. They're getting a lot of conversation activity. How do you make sense of all that? Especially when a lot of the messages you're getting are very low value, like, hey, hey, hey, hi, hi, hey, it's. How do you make sense of all that? And so a lot of this is facilitated by algorithms. And we've seen algorithms do great work. I mean, they're at the center of match and other dating products. But where we were truly trying to go with this is to bring the human element back into dating. If you think about, you know, before online dating, there was the alternatives to meeting people in bars where there were like dating services that were facilitated by matchmakers. And so we're kind of harkening back to the early days of technology, facilitated dating and bringing a human being in. So I mentioned earlier that we have this team of experts, dating experts, and we have a service that we provide through our experts called Expert Picks. It's essentially an algorithm, helps to generate a collection of profiles that we think might be good. And then an expert goes through that list based on criteria that they've discussed with the user and then provides what they think is the best pick in response to the user's input. And the results speak for themselves. The picks that come from expert picks are engaged with at eight times higher of a rate. Now we have another similar offering which is called Match by Us. Match by Us is a solution where users can opt in and we ask them a few additional questions and that gives our algorithm even more information. And then we provide essentially like one really high quality match every week. And these pics have four times the engagement of normal pics that are found in what we call our Discover stack. And I think beyond that, if you're on the other side of this and you're trying to stand out knowing that there's all this noise, you're not necessarily using Expert Picks or Match by Us yet like simply just sending a, like with a message. We call that an initiation message and something you can do on Match you can't do in most other dating products. Those have two times the success rate of likes that are not sent with a message. So it's just there's a lot of options here to cut through the noise and many of them are facilitated by technology. But like just bringing the human being back in is by far like the most successful thing we've seen yet.

Can you reflect on that? Like why do we think that a person has this ability to, to help match us better? In one world you could say we're just as people, we're just overwhelmed with choices and we don't know who of these thousands of humans could be matched with us. In another world you say, you know, we actually just don't understand ourselves and it's really hard for us to see who would be good for us. And the self reflection needs to improve and having somebody else come with an objective point of view could be helpful in this market service. What do you think is going on here?

I think you said it, that there's a benefit in having someone who's an informed outsider looking at your profile, your interests, how you like to form connections with people, a bunch of other information and making sense of that amidst all the information profiles that are out there. It is really hard for users to see outside themselves. In fact, Jen, I know, I know you and I had been talking about that earlier.

Yeah, I think, you know, people are not the best predictors of who is going to be compatible or good for them. Oftentimes people have all of these criteria of what they find desirable or attractive for the person and when they actually end up on a date with that person, none of those things translate into in real life attraction. There have been scientific studies that demonstrate that lack of prediction, a predictive ability between what someone is looking for in A static profile versus their experience in person. Right. I think what we are learning, and this is something that we want to keep working on, is that you really need two people to interact before you have any real gauge or any real sense of compatibility between two people. And that's what we're trying to do on Match, right? Trying to push people to meet sooner rather than later to gauge that real, that true compatibility.

She's right. We're biased when we look for matches, which actually makes us less efficient when it comes to finding someone we're compatible with. One study examined six months worth of data from nearly 15,000 online dating interactions and found that men and women both tend to send messages to the most desirable users, regardless of the person's own social desirability. We may be shooting for the stars online more than we would in an offline setting. This lack of understanding about our own preferences, thinking we will be only happy with a woman who looks like a model or a six foot male, means we're missing out on people who we may also be compatible with. In this game where choice is hard and we have limited time, you can imagine that people are making mistakes and that if we could kind of correct for some of these mistakes, people would be better matched in love. So what mistakes do people make when looking for their person?

Yeah, I think there are a number of things that can be challenging about this online dating space. And I think the very first thing is that the market itself is not a transparent one. So if you compare the online dating experience to a party or a bar experience, you're able to see all of your competition and who the competition is talking to. Right. But you have none of that information when you are browsing profiles online. And so you might be talking to someone who is overloaded with attention and your chance of any kind of success is very low. But, you know, you might not have visibility into that. So that's issue number one. Right. And the second thing is what I had mentioned earlier about people just generally being bad at predicting in real life attraction from static profiles. You know, there's so much more to a person than just what they say about themselves. Right? There's the quality of how they move, how they sound, how they smell, all of these things. You really need to be in person to experience that. And also the nature of online dating, it really puts people or it encourages people to be in this shopping mindset where they are trying to compare different options against each other versus just, you know, meeting up with someone that they are attracted to or interested in. Enough and then taking the time to get to know that person to see if they're a good match or not. So, you know, there are a lot of flaws with which people are seeking mates in this process, but we are, you know, trying to do things to get around those issues.

Shopping mindset is actually a great way of framing this. When we use dating apps, it's easy to think that our options are limitless, which can be crippling. It's like you're searching online for a very specific piece of clothing and you're bombarded with results. Sometimes you just put your phone down and walk away without buying anything. Psychologist Rebecca Heino talks about the idea of relation shopping. She suggests that it's easy for people to think of online dating as a market. In her interviews with dating site users, she found that they tend to objectify potential partners. Seeing others profiles as sales pitches or promotional devices, and the product they're selling is themselves. Having seemingly infinite options can also result in what we'd call a, a maximizing mindset. This means online daters often adopt a goal to choose the best options. If there are plenty of fish in the sea, it becomes difficult to be satisfied with the one in front of you, so you keep shopping. Studies have shown that online daters who choose from a large set of potential partners diverge more from their own stated preference. So they end up spending more time studying profiles of one weaker matches than those who had a smaller set of partners. So in this sense, it seems to be critical to not overload users with unlimited choice.

Yeah, and while this is a learning process, like Jin said, our team of experts try to help users overcome some of these biases that Jin mentioned. And the results, as I mentioned earlier, speak for themselves. I mean, people who engage with our team of experts have many multiples more likelihood of getting inbound interest and of then going on high quality dates. And so we're continuing to explore ways like experts that are scalable of helping people to best represent themselves and to learn and grow as they go through their dating journeys.

How good are daters at asking for expert help? Like, is this something they realize immediately or do you need to tell them how great it is?

No, that's definitely been one of the. Not being able to ask for help and not knowing that you need help are the biggest barriers to growing the adoption of the use of our experts team. We, you know, I think we need to do a lot more to normalize that getting help is okay. I mean, people get help all the time. There's okay you're going to use TurboTax versus filling out your tax return on paper. And you might even use an accountant from H and R blog or another service to help you at that. People seek help from doctors, people seek help from dentists. They're getting help all over the place. We just need to kind of normalize it as there's another professional in your life who's an expert in what you're trying to do and who cares about you achieving the goals that you set for yourself. Just have to let them help you.

I will say that we do make it easy for people to seek help if they need it. We do offer a free phone call to have a one on one consultation with an expert if they're looking for that. We also feature this expert pick service prominently so you know the help is there if people want it. Right.

It is interesting. Whereas if it was required. So if everyone had to go to one therapy session in life, you'd imagine therapy would lose its negative stigma of needing help or having something wrong with you. So on some level it'd be interesting to require everyone to talk to somebody because then we'd lose a stigma of I am somebody who needs help. I know probably from a business perspective this is hard for you to scale, but interesting.

I think people have a hard time admitting to themselves to other people that they need help. But in general, I think we will all benefit from help.

100% agree. Yeah. Other people have the problem. I of course do not. I am not biased. Other people are biased.

Yeah. And I don't, and I don't know if we've seen this play out yet in the research, but one trend I've noticed is that I think some folks conflate the fact that they're having conversations or getting inbound interest with the fact that they don't need help. Like that's not what matters. Right. What matters is are you meeting good quality people, assessing chemistry, vibing with them, and having sustained sustainable interactions with them that will lead to the kind of romantic outcomes you're looking for and match. Our users are typically looking to enter into romantic partnerships. So are you doing that? Are you doing everything you could be to maximize the likelihood of that happening quickly? I don't think so. If you're just getting a bunch of haze, you're. You're kind of not actually.

Let's transition to talk about messaging while we're on the hey phenomenon. You know, messaging is kind of the bread and butter of these apps where you're trying to suss out if this is somebody you should invest more time with. And so any experiments that you've done to increase the engagement with messaging?

Yeah, we have our premium users are able to see who looked at their profile. And we've recently done experiments where we explore how do we sort that list. And we found that sorting by people who've been just recently in the app has had great results in whether people choose to then say, okay, of the people who view my profile or who liked me, I will then engage with them. And so there's just small things like that that make a huge difference in terms of getting conversations started. Now beyond that, I mean, there's all sorts of fundamental product design decisions we've made to help increase engagement with messaging. So for instance, when you're in our, when you're looking through profiles in our Discover tab, we make it the initiation I mentioned earlier that has a two times higher likelihood of leading to a date. We make that very visible, the ability to send an initiation. We also have Match by us and expert picks which get conversations started with arguably higher quality matches. We've been also match has been known a while back for having come in and you can't really do as much as other dating apps. And so we've opened up our business model substantially to allow a much more robust premium experience so free users can do more, which gets more conversations started. And then we're exploring work with, you know, essentially in conversation prompts to restart stagnant conversations, icebreakers to get conversations started, and all sorts of other methods to just provide make it as users are hesitating, thinking about what, what, what do I say? I don't know. This is kind of boring. I don't want to have to like sit here and brainstorm. Maybe I'll go do something else like in that moment, trying to keep the conversation going.

It's pretty incredible that these small things like how you sort of a list of people can drive us to connect or not connect and how close connection could be and yet how far away it is if it's hard for us to do it. Seems like a lot of these changes that you're making are just making it easier for people to do this thing, which is seemingly psychologically hard message A stranger on the Internet. Any thoughts on gender differences of how males and females behave differently in this context?

Yeah, we do have some, you know, insight on how different genders interact. And I want to just caveat that these learnings are specific to heteronormative relationships. So, you know, in general, if we, if we go back to that party, that bar metaphor. You know, men are doing the approaching and women are being approached. So broadly speaking, men are looking for more matches and they're sending out as many messages as they can or likes as they can. And women are receiving too many. Right. And so you have this imbalance of messages being sent. And so what this tends to translate into is that men are typically more eager to and looking to pay for ways to make sure their signal is being heard.

In the dating world, gender differences are stark. A study analyzed more than 6,000 online daters, profile viewing and contact initiation behavior. One of the questions the study asks is, are men and women different when it comes to browsing and reaching out? The results are stunning. Men viewed more than three times as many profiles as women. They were approximately 40% more likely to initiate a conversation. The average man sent 3.2 times more first contact messages than did the average woman. These differences add up. So what's behind these behavioral differences between men and women? It's most likely several things, but one reason the study identified is that differences in motives probably play a role when presented with a variety of options. Male users tend to prefer short term romantic relationships with a low level of commitment. In contrast, female users report motives based on less romantic reasons, such as finding friends, in addition to more romantic reasons, like finding a potential marriage partner. This could be why women are more picky.

So whether there's something like a super, like, men tend to be engaging through that way. And then on the flip side, women, they're interested in cutting through the noise, feeling less overwhelmed. And so we do have this Ghostbusters features that helps to get rid of the noise.

Can you talk about that Ghostbuster feature?

Yeah. So Ghostbusters is a feature that we introduced recently that takes stagnant conversations and kind of reminds you, hey, this is still going. It's your turn to say something. And if you are still inactive after seven days, it puts it into like an archived messages section. So it cleans up inactive messages completely from your view. And so we've seen the effect of this is that there's less unmatching activity. But there's also users are able to focus on the matches that really matter. So it's kind of netting out to a positive effect. And you know, I think because of the nudging that we do, users are kind of urged to make a decision about a match, which is, you know, kind of celebrating these, like, adult behaviors that emotionally mature behaviors, such as making a decision about someone and not ghosting them Hence Ghostbusters. And, you know, Ghostbusters really helps to bring that thought process front of mind.

This also probably makes people feel like they're making progress, because if you see a list of inactive messages, you may log into the platform and be like, well, I really haven't made much progress, when in reality you may have a few active messages and this is all you need to really continue on your journey. And so I like the idea that maybe this perception of progress could be accelerated by how you prioritize the match status. So I've now messaged somebody. You guys have to think about how you help facilitate or understand getting me from this back and forth banter to an actual offline meeting. For dating websites like Match, their goal in an interesting way is to have people quit using them by finding them the perfect match. So at some point, people need to choose between deciding to keep meeting new people and settling down. But when is the optimal time to stop? Mathematicians have tackled this problem and proposed the famous 37% rule. This magical formula states that to have the highest chance of picking the very best suitors, you should date and reject the first 37% of your total group of lifetime suitors. Then you follow a simple rule. You pick the next person who is better than anyone from the first 37%. However, in real life, we don't know how many potential partners we will encounter. And checking out each person and making a well rounded decision is time consuming. How does Match tackle this problem for their users?

Yeah, you know, what we found and learned from our users is that their preferences for meeting and interacting with people are pretty on par with what we would recommend in terms of the optimal stopping point. So in general, people are talking to no more than three people in an average week. And their ideal number of first dates in a week is one date per week, which I think for all intents and purposes, that is a pretty good volume and pace at trying to get to know people and go on dates. I think all of this we do have a group of users who are doing things the way that is optimal for the kind of relationship that they're looking for.

Is there a time optimization function here where you could basically imagine messaging people for 30 days and getting to them really, really well. What is the. If you were to give people an anchor on how long messages should go on, what's that anchor?

Yeah, I think people tend to make that first date within the week of starting to chat with someone. So if you match with someone you know on a Monday, you might be making a date For Friday or Saturday. Right. So usually that first date happens pretty quickly.

That's really nice to kind of push people and say, look, this is something that you shouldn't delay that if you're into somebody, taking it to the next step is probably sooner than later. Could be an interesting rule of thumb. How many messages should people have going on at once? You said they have three. Any thoughts on if this is correct? Like should we be messaging more people to have more at bats or less people to focus our time a little bit more and put more into each one?

I think for this group of high intent daters, concentrating one's efforts on fewer potentials the better. I think it would be very overwhelming to try to get to know a number of people at the same depth. The kind of connection that we are trying to get, you know, these matches to, to get to a level of. So yeah, I think, you know, less like a few, a handful would be best.

And there's a balance of strike there between like if you do have a lot of matches, how do you know where to spend your time? Like how do you focus? As Jen mentioned. So there's a balancing act here between being friendly and personable and social, but also needing to get information that will help you determine where to focus. And so I think I've seen some of our more effective users are asking kind of somewhat open ended litmus test type of questions where the correct answer isn't implicit from how it's worded. So for instance, the question could be what's your ideal first date look like? I mean that's in the realm of cliche at this point, but that's an example of the type of question that is open ended and one person might have a pretty clear idea of what their good first date is like. If someone says I want to go skydiving and you have no interest in ever doing that, you might not be the best fit there. So yeah, I think that's something that I think seen more effective users blend into their messaging approach.

That's nice. It's kind of like being interviewed for a job or interviewing for a job. You would never ask yes or no questions. You would try to get the other person to open up, to talk, to share their experiences. Obviously we don't want to compare dating to be like a professional job interview, but maybe there are some parallels here by which your goal is to just get the other person to talk. Any other opening lines that could replace a hey babe sort of opening line?

I think some of the qualitative feedback I've heard from users is that the kinds of conversations that get them interested and get them going are when each response seems to open a whole other world of possibilities. So I think like you said, that open ended tactic is definitely a way to ensure that a conversation continues, but also, you know, general curiosity, bringing in a good amount of personal disclosure, a bit of vulnerability, not too much, just a little to keep things interesting, to feel intimate, to feel close, to feel connected.

We have seen that messages with longer character counts up to a limit do perform better, you know, so like your 2 and 3. Hi. Hey. Those types of messages tend to perform worse. But any message, any message is going to be better than no message if you have the ability to send one when you're sending the like. And Match lets you do that.

So basically saying something better than nothing, but also being maybe genuine, authentic in a real conversational tone is probably going to beat the hey babe, nice reminder. And do you give people this feedback real time that this, that these short messages are not going to work in their favor?

No, unfortunately we don't and there's a lot of room to improve there and you know, creating. If we're really trying to drive all of our users on great dates, there's, you know, a lot of room to improve conversations. Get those great and then get those date, get great dates that follow from those as well as alternative. You know, Jen mentioned the importance of quickly assessing compatibility in those first seven days. How can we get someone in the first seven minutes determining if there's compatibility? We're exploring those types of approaches as well.

Have you gone on to video where people can hop on a video call and see the other person or are you pushing kind of the offline experience of meeting up?

Yeah. So before COVID there was an extremely low level of interest in. It was like single digits interest in video chatting. And with COVID that's shot up to over 70%. And so yeah, it's a huge shift, people's openness to having early interactions over video and audio. And so in response to that, during the pandemic Match released the ability to do a vibe check, a video check in with someone who you've been talking to. And yeah, it's still not used by 70% of users, but the users who do use it, they have very positive sentiment around it. And that's another thing that, you know, I guess to move messaging along, if you could do a video check in with a feature like vibe check is a huge boon to getting on a great date faster.

Yeah. So Even though, you know, videos, video calls don't have a very high adoption rate at the moment, it is something that we are pushing people to do and educating people on. So we do, you know, marketing emails that give people like top tips on how to, you know, have a good video call. Right. I think there is not just, I mean, there's definitely some level of awareness and education that needs to happen around video calling. People are still not completely comfortable with that idea. It is a relatively new phenomenon. So we are providing some education on how to have the best video dates.

We're going to end with a question that we typically ask guests to reflect on, which is imagine back in the day, the first movie to be released was filmed with a one shot angle. And in hindsight you'd look back and say, what are you doing? Why don't you just move the camera? What was happening is that the mental model of photography, which is you stand in one place and you take a picture, was being used for movies. And in hindsight that's incredibly obvious where you just move the camera. But in the moment it wasn't as obvious. And so when you think about dating now and you think about where we are today, but you put yourself in the future and you look back at today, what's going to be so obvious that we're just missing because, you know, we're in the mindset of, of a one shot movie versus moving the camera around.

In my world, I think people would move away from that shopping mindset of viewing dates as, you know, products to choose from in a marketplace and more of here are like people possibly meet and then I'll meet them and get to know them. Right. And just really move from online to offline as quickly as possible. I'm hoping that over time people will realize how limited this static profile really is as a value of signal and understanding that it's an in person date that gives you the information you really need.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that the kind of like Match chat funnel is, you know, even though Match is based on that right now, we know it's not as effective as it could be. And if we're trying to really drive great dates for all of our users, we know we need to explore different approaches. We know that there's a better way to do this than this typical funnel that's been kind of like normalized by other dating products including and Match. And so I think there's a lot of room to explore alternative ways of getting users in front of each other quickly. Like Jen mentioned. You know, for instance, how can you get users doing that kind of like vibe check and checking in with each other during a conversation? How can you get users hearing each other's voices earlier to assess compatibility? And then how can you get people who have a high intention to meet up quickly, getting them in front of other users who have a high intention? Mention the meetup quickly so that they can, you know, assess compatibility in person and avoid that whole endless chatting that.

Was Jin and Matt of Match. You know, at the top of every episode of the Science of Change, I say pretty much the same thing. X is hard. Whatever the topic is. Losing weight is hard. Managing our finances is hard. Searching for jobs is hard. And they are. I promise I wasn't exaggerating and these were all actual episodes. You should check them out. But dating is different. Dating is really hard. And online dating in particular can be even harder because of how we tend to lead with our most superficial preferences, most of them physical and dating apps play into that with the profile pictures and asking our height and asking our weight. All things that play into the more surfacey things that studies show aren't as predictive of long term happiness. It does appear Match is trying to prioritize the deeper stuff with longer form profiles and proactive recommendations to help people sort through the noise. But one thing I worry about with all dating apps is the lack of appreciation for the urgency some users should have to find a match, particularly people who are no longer in their 20s and are no longer interested in just shaking the tree and seeing what they find. The older we get, the smaller our dating pool gets, it's just a fact. So lots of people who use dating apps are looking for long term happiness. And dating apps don't always push these users hard enough to explore outside of their traditional comfort zones and widen their search. An engineer for the dating website Hinge cited this stat. The top 5% of men on dating apps receive 41.1% of all women's likes, meaning the top guys hog all the attention while the regular guy gets ignored. It's almost as bad for women. The top 5% of women on dating apps receive 30.6% of men's likes. As we age and the dating pool narrows, this strategy just doesn't hold up. If you want to end up with someone, you'll need to widen your search or settle down younger. This is not advice I take lightly, but it is real talk. The author John Berger said it nicely. It's not that he's just not that into you. It's that there aren't enough of him. That's the next big challenge in the dating app space, helping everyone, not just the most socially desirable people, find their perfect batch. The Science of Change podcast is presented by Set Sail. Act on the moments to lead to a sale. Visit them at Setsale co or on LinkedIn to learn more about the world's number one revenue execution platform. If you like behavioral science and want to learn how you can apply it to your work, head to irrational labs.com we have a variety of courses available. Use Discount code podcast for 20% off. This podcast is produced by Irrational Labs and StudioPod Media. Our executive producer is Rachel Roberts. All episodes are written by me, Kristin Berman, and Ying Lin with expert script editing by Jack Buer. Special thanks to Lydia Troup for fact checking and citations.