joshtimonen

I also dislike the trend away from bordered buttons in iOS 7. Users shouldn't have to guess whether something is a label or a button. Trading off that usability for just a little visual cleanliness seems like a bad deal.

Great points, thanks. I like extending the thought experiment to real world objects like toilets, because they too have 'user interfaces', even if we don't immediately relate them to computer operating systems.

This also reminds me of something Neil Gaiman said, which is really a second hand quote from Douglas Adams:

From: http://readingagency.org.uk/news/blog/neil-gaiman-lecture-in...

"I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before the kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content."

When we arrive at good design, it can be surprisingly resilient.

Pretty cool.

We've posted some follow-up comments on how we're trying to improve the quality of Date.fm here: http://blog.date.fm/post/13881727508/how-quality-and-simplic...

Would love to hear your thoughts.

If you're not fussy you can do that. You could widen your range to anywhere in the world and ages 18-99. But you may not be within the person you like's age range or geography criteria, so that strategy would only take you so far.

Would you want to expose people to your entire social world when you're still experimenting with whether or nor your even compatible with them? Dating experiments often go sour, or you might find out that someone is truly crazy. That's why we decided on a completely separate ecosystem that doesn't integrate with any other social platform. When things go bad, we think users would rather be able to quarantine the experience. In Date.fm, users can simply swipe and delete a match from their list, and it's removed on both sides. Neither can bother the other beyond that.

We totally agree about the online dating stigma, but we've got to be identifiable in some way.

You know, we discussed many ideas that have such public elements, like "Where you are" public statements, but we ultimately decided against it because we felt it might be susceptible to stalker behavior. And I don't think a lot of people would be comfortable putting that kind of information out into the world publicly. We kept coming back to the realization that a private chat is where information has to be exchanged.

We also feel that the simplicity will help encourage new users as the months and years go by. We think most people stay away from online dating because of the unnecessary complexity, when really they just want to be able to start chatting with people who like them, that they also like.

I encourage everyone to spend 10 minutes on hotornot.com, and then try date.fm for 10 minutes. Once you've done that, I think you'll see just how different it feels. While our monetization strategy is a simple ad banner, we think it's much better than a complex system of paid accounts, credits and other upgrades that most sites rely on for revenue.

Thanks for your feedback. I've rewritten this bit to hopefully make the point better. I agree this is NOT what users actively do on these sites. But I think this is what the service is essentially doing under the hood in many cases.

I agree that there are people who prefer the time-saving methods used with many of the major online dating services, and they will certainly continue to use those, but we feel they may be missing out on people that they didn't expect.