This Is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for The Globe & Mail. Today I am delighted to speak to one of my colleagues, Jui Ramaprasad.
Jui, you have been doing some interesting research on online dating, tell us about that.
JUI RAMAPRASAD - What we actually do is look at how technology enabled features impact behaviour on online dating. For example, one of the biggest studies we have done looks a how anonymous browsing impacts user behaviour on these sites. When we go to a bar and try to meet our partner, let's say, you can't turn off your face and you can't say all of a sudden I am anonymous and I am going to look around, that doesn't happen but online you can. So we look at how that impacts matching outcomes and what we have actually found is surprising to us. We thought that people would be more disinhibited, they will look around more and they will match more, actually what happened was the matches went down, especially for women. What we have actually found from that is that women leave a weak signal by visiting somebody's profile and when they don't have that ability to do that, for some reason, the social norms that we saw several years ago where women don't make the first move still exist on online dating sites. The way women can make the first move is by visiting somebody's profile, leaving a weak signal, instead of sending a strong signal, right, by sending a message and that is what initiates a match.
KARL MOORE – So Jui, what is the manager implications or marketing implications of what you have learned in your research in online dating.
JUI RAMAPRASAD - This is a feature that many online dating sites sell, they want this to be a big thing. What we actually found was something counter-intuitive or something unexpected. So I think the big take away for this is, with all of these technology enabled features in online platforms, to really understand your consumers you really have to figure out maybe through experimentation in an ethical way, we have seen it happen in unethical ways but in an ethical way, see how different features actually impact user behaviour and figure out how to make the user experience better by a little bit of experimentation. It is so easy to do on an online platform, there requires a little bit of programming for some of it, but often it is really easy to flip a switch and say ok what happens if we just give this set of users a feature that we are trying to test out and see if that actually makes them more engaged or makes them have better outcomes, or whatever that is for the site.