'Product People, Mind the Gap!' by Samuel Hulick (ux.useronboard.com)
over 6 years ago from Renee P, Designer, NZ
over 6 years ago from Renee P, Designer, NZ
Hi all! I'm the person who wrote this. If you have any curious questions or withering critiques, I will be checking this all day and responding to everything I see. Hope you enjoy!
Love your post. I am doing a self-teardown of my product right now ;)
Awesome! Please let me know how it works out! samuel@useronboard.com (seriously, I love to hear about these and will help however I reasonably can)
Hello, designer @ Match here — really thankful you used Tinder as your example. Thank you for the free work B)
With the Match.com product in particular we have some big problems to solve in a shifting dating landscape and I'm not convinced we're currently thinking about any of them in the right way. Seeing the way you think gives me hope that there is a path to a better product.
I'll add, for your consideration, that solving the problem of a Medium user encourages retention in the sense that they will continue needing that problem solved. The same is obviously true of Tinder due to the hookup element (though we're all in agreement here, now, that Tinder isn't a hookup app but a multi-purpose relationship product.) With something like Match, however, if you solve a user's problem extremely well then they leave your product possibly forever. That's a real challenge for the subscription dating business model. I'd love to know what you think about this kind of conflict of interest.
That's a great point! I think the response isn't to wish the reality of the situation were different, though, and instead capitalize on doing it so well that even though you "lose" the successful daters, you get even more singles in return via glowing reviews and word of mouth.
Thanks, my intuition is the same. This kind of misalignment of interests is guaranteed to have bad results in the long term. It's the kind of thinking I would like to defeat, instead focusing on providing the best product and the best service.
I do not really understand what problems can arise with such a popular trend as dating. People rush to a new resource like a child to sweets. There is one slippery moment - paid subscriptions and paid additional features. This may turn off potential customers. I myself had a period when I used only open hookup chat rooms - https://www.nastyhookups.com/hookup/chat-room.html It was a great experience and understanding of what is actually expected of me on a dating site.
I loved this article when it hit my inbox and I'm glad to see it posted here too. Excellent food for thought!
Thank you, Andrew!
Great read!
Thank you, Samuel!
(cheers on the name)
(Not really about this article, but about your work in general) What tool do you use for annotations?
Keynote!
@Renee Thank you for sharing this!
My pleasure, it's good stuff man. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
The pleasure's all mine! It was super fun to write this one.
Well, thanks everybody.
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