The Dating Game
How do busy people find love? Increasingly, they turn to online dating sites like Yahoo! Personals.
But once they connect with that special someone online, how do they take the next step and actually arrange to meet them in the offline world?
How does, say, a single parent who is also managing kids and job decide when and where they will meet a new date? Do they select a restaurant in their neighborhood to enhance their sense of safety? Or do they choose a place far from home to protect their privacy and avoid running into acquaintances?
And, just as important, how do people use technology to initiate new relationships? Do they use online calendaring tools to schedule a date weeks in advance? Or do they use mobile devices to micro-coordinate their plans, adjusting the time and place of their meeting according to what’s going on at that particular moment?
Elizabeth Churchill, leader of Yahoo!’s Media Experience Research group, believes that finding the answers to these important questions could result in better services for users and direct economic benefit for a company like Yahoo!
"Most people go online to enhance and enrich their offline experiences," Churchill says. "Understanding how the internet fits into people’s lives means spending time with them. So what are they doing in the offline world with the information they get from Yahoo!? Is there a way we can serve them better, or is there something else we could be providing?"
Churchill and her team picked online dating as one area for research because there is a lot of work being done in mobile services around coordination and connection. "It is predicted that by 2008 more people will be accessing the internet from mobile devices than from desktops," she says. "It becomes even more essential for Yahoo! to be able to support users as they transition from one device to another, and from one place to another."
In particular, Churchill is very interested in what these services will look like going forward and how they can help people find each other, find places and find things to do together.
Though the project is still in its very early stages, Churchill says she has uncovered some interesting insights about the way people approach online dating. For instance, she discovered that a relatively high number of dating site users don’t conduct independent online searches on the people who interest them. Even though they know people may exaggerate, users don’t typically leverage other resources to further investigate the person concerned.
"I was surprised to learn that others don’t do general searches on potential dates, because that would be the first thing I’d do." says Churchill. "Being surprised is important because it highlights where one’s assumptions are not necessarily the same as other people’s. If we don’t look for, and take heed of, those surprises, we could end up designing applications and services that are just for ourselves."
The ultimate goal of the research is to help develop useful, enjoyable, and socially appropriate applications that fit into people’s lives. And, of course, when the opportunity presents itself, to deliver high-quality, targeted advertising and information that allow people to find what they are looking for.
"As we design increasingly powerful information devices, we need to look at how people are using them and what Yahoo! could do to add to the experience,"” says Churchill. "Our job is to identify other roles we could play to become an even more useful part of everyday life."
