Best way to display whether someone is the right age for a match on an online dating site?

Question

When I visit another person's dating profile, I'd like to see a visual indicator that communicates something about a person's age so I can determine whether they might be a good match for me--without displaying precise age. The goal is to minimize the use of age as a factor for selection, without minimizing it entirely. What's the right mechanic and the best visual indicator to accomplish this goal?

Options we've considered:

• Fuzzy it up: Joe is 30ish.
• Relative to you: Joe is a bit younger than you.
• Compliance to a range: Joe is within your dating range.
• Math required: Joe graduated in high school when Tears for Fears was a hit.

What is the best way to do this?

Answer 1

I would go for a variation on JohnGB's answer.

Instead of 'Young' and 'Old' which are subjective, use real date ranges. If I select 30-35 (a 5 year range) as my ideal date range, the middle green box text should be '30-35'. Using 'Match' or '✔' instead assumes I can remember my ideal date range and that I understand that a '✔' represents that.

On either side of '30-35' should be age ranges the same length in years as my ideal age range (5 years), above and below, IE: '24-29' and '36-41'. '24-29' and '36-41' should both be the same yellow/orange. In John's answer 'Young' is orange and 'Old' is red, suggesting 'Old' is a worse option. Ideally you wouldn't show results below 24 and above 41 in this case, but if needed those should be "18-23" & "42+", where 18 is the assumed minimum site age.

(Apologies for stealing JohnGB's image styling here, but I can't insert images in a comment on his answer)

Answer 2

I would consider using something visual, so that it is faster to scan. Here are two quick examples that I put together to illustrate what I mean.

Edit: To clarify some confusion here, the 'young', 'old', and 'match' are referring to relative to the users preference. So if I set my match as 30-40 year olds, then someone 25 would show as young, and someone 45 would show as old. But if my match preferences were set at 50-55, a 40 year old would show as too young.

As a short explanation of some of my reasoning here:

It will improve scannability / scan speed if you make the various options visually very different, while still maintaining the overall visual cohesion. To to that, I have varied the position (most important), colour (second most important), and shape or text. The option with icons as opposed to text will be better for this, but poorer in discoverability. You would need to decide which is more important to you.

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Edit: An alternate option that allows more accuracy, but is a little less scannable.

The choices of colours in this isn't very important, as long as they are easily distinguishable and that the match colour (green in this case) is not overpowered by another colour. You could combine icons in the colour indicators, but I would argue that this makes it look too busy.

Answer 3

Man, those options are awesome!

• Fuzzy it up: Not bad, but a 10 years range feels quite broad.

• Relative to you: This is my favourite approach for dates ("This week", "2 days ago"), and I think it's a good option in this case. But "A bit younger than you" sound a tiny judgmental to me, not sure if it's just a feeling. For me it read as somehow negative.

• Compliance to a range: A safe option, if the user has previously selected a preferred range.

• My personal favourite, but I see one problem with it: You don't want to show an exact age but you are allowing the user to do a quick search and find out. Plus, your references might be unknown to some. It is a nice widget, though, and I'd consider adding it in combination with 3.

So from my point of view: 3, and a smaller 4 below it.

Answer 4

Why display it at all? Why not allow the user to set acceptable age ranges for a date in their profile and then only include profiles in a search when the searcher falls with each profile's desired range? The age of both the searcher and searchee would need to fall within each other's range.

One of the things that many women complain about is getting undesired messages from men twice their age. Not displaying the age would solve both problems.

Answer 5

There is no best way. It depends on so many other factors. For instance, is your site designed for senior citizens? Teens? Those two groups have vastly different needs and expectations. For example, older people may not care about a five year age difference, whereas the difference between 22 and 27 can be vast.

You also need to consider the tone you're trying to set with your potential customers. Are you a dating site for millionaires? Members of Mensa? Gen-Y'ers? What may be amusing and edgy to one might be very annoying to another.

Have you tried asking potential users of your system what they would expect? Personally I prefer "Relative to you", but I may not be your target audience.

As a final suggestion, below whichever method you choose, put a link that says something like "show me ages in a different format" which takes you to a page that gives you the same choices you have in your question, with a radiobutton beside each choice.

Answer 6

I think the answer is dependent on what you offer your users as a selection criterion. If you allow users to set the age range they are interested in, then you should just stick to that I think. If you do allow setting the age range, there are two approaches I see:

1. Always apply the range both ways, so if user A (aged 23) indicates that he/she is interested in partners between 20 and 30, user B of 32 but interested in partners between 20 and 40 won't show up for user A but user B also won't get to see user A in their matches or the other way around.
2. Give users the options to be approached by users outside their indicated age range. In that case, user A still won't see user B in the results, but user B would get user A in their results. I doubt however if many people would enable such an option, but that's just my feeling.

I don't think that it is a good user experience if you still get messages from users that are outside of the acceptable date range for a match that you set yourself without a way to opt out from that as in option 2 above, even if that means that other users will get less results. Note that though getting few matches may be disappointing, it will give even more disappointing if a large number of "matches" immediately express that they are not interested, or worse, don't respond at all. Also, it seems annoying for the people that are not interested in these matches to get messages from they all the same. It will decrease the signal/noise ratio for these users.

You could also opt to go for a default acceptable range, and not give users an option, or use a default range only if no explicit range was set. A rule of thumb that might work for your case is to use the age/2 + 7 formula for the minimal age of a partner. For our 23 year old user A, that would mean the lower range would be 23/2 + 7 = 19 (I'd round up) up to (23-7) * 2 = 32 years. By default, user B would be shown then.