OkCupid is one of the best-designed websites out there. It’s addictive, captivating, easy to use, and pretty. But since it’s free and completely funded by advertising, the ultimate design goal of the site must be to get users to visit more pages, view more ads, and click on some. And this design goal can be taken to extremes that are at odds with the goal of providing quality matching. Consider this screenshot:
This was from the unauthenticated view of my (now-disabled) OkCupid profile. The black text in the bottom half of this screen-shot was my somewhat snide response to OkCupid’s seventh-grade reading level getting-to-know-you question. And at the top is a plug for a different user and an ad for a book that has absolutely nothing to do with me or my tastes1.
The last thing that any OkCupid user should want is for readers to be distracted from their profile like this. And I really didn’t want some site co-opting my identity and interspersing advertisements and links to generate more page views into the middle of it. Even if it was to support a free site. So, OkCupid, you have joined the ranks of other online dating sites that just don’t cut it. Thanks, but no thanks.
- A Summer Affair‘s plot summary on Amazon makes it sound like an upscale romance novel with a helping of East Coast affluence-porn thrown in. [↩]