Figuring Out OKCupid Part 2: The Tools of the Trade

Last time I discussed how online dating is perceived by most people, and how participating in one dating website in particular (OKCupid) feels like for the average user at a high level. I also very briefly explained the inner workings of OKCupid's site. In this post, I will go into much further detail about the site's layout and functionality to set up for a more rigorous analysis of OKCupid user experience and lessons learned in the next post.


Let me start this post off with a highly relevant Latin quote:

fortis Fortuna adiuvat

Which, if the Wiktionary page on the phrase is to be trusted, literally translates to "(the) strong (one), Fortune helps." or is more colloquially interpreted as "Fortune favors the bold."

This mantra accurately reflects the struggle users experience on OKCupid, whether they are aware of it or not: simply sitting on your thumbs waiting for something great to possibly happen to you almost certainly gets you nowhere. It is better to have tried and failed, than to have not attempted anything at all. Similar quotes are the probably more well-known "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" by Wayne Gretzky (alluding to hockey in the metaphor) and likely even more well-known "Do or do not, there is not try" by Star Wars' own Jedi Master, Yoda. Being an active OKCupid user is a real uphill battle for every single user--you suit up in your "I'm safe behind the screen" armor, trudge into the coliseum of courting and attempt to forge your own path through the tangled-up mess of people on your quest to slay the monster in the closet that is love, and brace yourself for what can get pretty heated and hurtful. Perhaps Pat Benatar was right all along, love is indeed a battlefield nowadays. Although in OKCupid's case, it's a significantly more anonymous battlefield with limited communication and outside awareness.

Fortune or not though, it doesn't matter how "bold" you are if you aren't effective in your...boldness. Sadly, most people on OKCupid do not take initiative in an advantageous way. The desire to seek validation and approval from others, fitting in with society, is a mountain-scaling that most people are not up to the task of. They would rather hide behind what seems to work instead of do what's natural for them. While we're throwing quotes around, here's another famous (yet relevant) one: "It is better to be hated for what you are, than loved for what you are not." André Gide was onto something, because that's EXACTLY what seems to be happening to most people's lives nowadays. Maintaining one's individuality in a large society is a difficult task. This is due to various sources of social pressure, in particular due to the media, the behaviors of friends and enemies, and the Internet in our society. Analysis in the next few posts will reveal this quite a bit on the OKCupid site.

Before beginning an analysis of OKCupid's website layout and tools, I feel it important to reiterate the two primary observations I pointed out in the last post:

1. When participating in online dating, people (generally) do not adapt if they are unsuccessful. All humans are capable of changing, but almost all of them have a difficult time of it.

2. Having control on the Internet is outstanding. To clarify, this is more about having a sense of control. Feeling like you yourself have control in an otherwise wild 'n' free open online world.

With these two statements in mind, let's take a deep dive into the site!

The OKCupid Homepage

To fill this post with pretty pictures, I've unfrozen my OKCupid account so I can take you through a virtual tour of the site and explain just what the heck is going on in all this madness. NOTE: This is the computer view (laptop, desktop web browser) of the site. This post doesn't cover the mobile view (phone, tablet), which is significantly more limited.

This is what I see when I unfreeze my account and OKCupid confirms my login via Facebook: the OKCupid homepage.

Names and identities have been as far removed as possible in order to protect the (not-so-)innocent, while still preserving the site's integrity.

This is an exact screenshot from right when I logged back in after a few months of being frozen. Busy, busy! I won't waste any time, let's get right down to it. Let's take a brief tour of the home page and a few noteworthy other pages, but first the dissection of the above screenshot:

1 - Personal settings. You can view your own profile (more detail later), change your account settings (more detail later) and log out. And if you somehow happen to know someone's OKCupid username, you can look them up...or have fun searching random people's usernames, I suppose. It's fun but also...kinda weird in hindsight.

2 - Hey wait, that's me! This is your miniature profile picture--see #9 in the lower right corner? That's where it will show up to other users if you visit their profile or Like them on the site, send them a message, etc. You can also boost your profile--but as we'll discuss later, this is not typically worth your money (and yes, it costs $$$!). This area will also show you how many search results you showed up in, within the last day...what does this mean? I've found that it's not very important, only that it's an indicator of how much potential attention your profile can get, and generally how active you are on OKCupid. I had just unfrozen my account upon taking this screenshot, so no one had visited my profile in the last day.

3 - Called "Home Matches" by the site, these are 10 people that are randomly highly matched with you. Refreshing the homepage will populate it with new people, but don't be surprised if you see previous people you've seen in this section over and over after enough site use. Clicking on any of them will take you to their profile. You only get to see their age, Match & Enemy % (more details later), location and picture in this view.

4 - OKCupid news feed & events. OKC lets you RSVP to certain events it hosts so you can meet others in person safely in a group setting, and these events appear at the top of the news feed from time to time. The actual news feed isn't shown in the above image, but it will show you recent user activity. I never figured out the patterns OKC tends to use to decide whose profile updates, question answers and new photo uploads to show me, but the news feed was almost always behind chronologically so it was pretty pointless anyway. That said, I clicked on this event and this is the page I'm brought to:

Oops, not enough ladies...yet.

Hoho, this is interesting. Seems like this is a happy hour event...but there's currently a gender imbalance! Not enough women have RSVP'd to this event yet. Still, this is generally what each event page is like--you can probably glean enough information based on the above screenshot.

5 - Browse Matches, Messages, Visitors & Quickmatch. This is the heart and soul of OKCupid, and will be explored later on in great detail.

6 - "You Might Like..." & "Recently Visited". These show you profiles of people the system thinks you would appreciate (if the random 10 giant profiles smack-dab in the middle of the page aren't enough for you) and the last several profiles you've visited, in order. When I first started out, you had to answer Questions in order to unlock more slots in these two features, but maybe it's changed since then.

7 - Online Bookmarks. This is a very handy feature that allows you to keep track of the online status of profiles you've bookmarked. If someone you've Favorited (not Liked; more on this later) logs in, you'll get a notification in the lower-right corner telling you that they've logged in...and more importantly, they'll appear under this list of Online Bookmarks. Very convenient!

8 - Match Questions. This is more of a prompt to take you to the Questions page, which I'll go into further detail about later. It will contain a question you have not yet answered. As you'll learn later, answering questions is crucial to getting matched with (mostly) similar users.

9 - Notifications & Chats. Chats are not shown, but if you have an ongoing conversation with someone else who is currently logged in to OKCupid then it will be displayed here. Any time someone messages, views your profile or Likes you (or is one of your Online Bookmarks as mentioned above) then a notification will appear in the lower-right corner for about 5 seconds to inform you.

The Profile

This is your life's blood on OKCupid. Everything you want everyone to know about you, it all goes here! OKCupid divides the user profile into four distinct sections: About, Photos, Questions & Personality. They're all very self-explanatory, but how to maximize their effectiveness...well, that's the secret sauce right there.

Let's check out the About section first. Here's roughly the first half of mine, just so you can see what the layout looks like when filled out. NOTE: Since meeting my girlfriend, my profile has been tailored towards making new female friends instead of searching for a woman to start a relationship with, so it is very atypical--please keep that in mind! I'll analyze sample male and female profiles later on, and who knows, I may try to reconstruct what my old potential-girlfriend-hunting profile for some self-analysis later.

Anyway, this is a snippet of my current profile.

"These are the days of our lives..."

This is the typical layout of the profile. Again, fairly straightforward. Let's check it out more.

At the top, we've got your (my) username and your (my) mug--hovering over a user's picture will show you two more thumbnails based on the pictures they've uploaded and cropped. Clicking on any of those photos will take you to their Photos profile tab. The remainder of the profile is below the photos section.

On the left, we've got the profile "essay" sections. The sections include:

• My self-summary
• What I'm doing with my life
• I'm really good at
• The first things people usually notice about me
• Favorite books, movies, shows, music and food
• The six things I could never do without
• I spend a lot of time thinking about
• On a typical Friday night I am
• The most private thing I'm willing to admit
• You should message me if

These are free clean slates for you to write whatever you'd like in. There are practically no limits--swear words are allowed, although I have a feeling certain racist slang or extremely disgusting terms aren't. You can write an essay for each section, or just a sentence or two. It's up to you!

On the right, we've got the "I'm Looking For" and "My Details" sections. I paid special attention to these sections when I was seriously active on OKCupid, because these say quite a bit about the user--this is how users pigeonhole themselves, and it gives you a lot of power to decide if you want to further consider this user or not. Note that the most common Status is not Seeing Someone, it's Single, and most people do not like putting their income because they feel insecure about it.

Remember--anyone can view a profile at any time, and the first thing they'll see is the About page. The About page may be the deciding factor between meeting your new greatest friend and lover...and never crossing paths with them for the rest of your life. Make the most of those seconds--possibly minutes--that others may spend looking through it and getting to know you online!


I'll briefly describe Photos, since it's just what you'd expect: pictures with you in them. I'd rather not clog up this blog with more pictures of myself, anyway. Clicking on the Photos profile tab brings you to a new screen where you can see your Profile Photos, other Albums (or prompting you to add a new album if you have no others), and an Instagram album (or if you don't have an Instagram account/haven't connected it to OKCupid, a prompt to connect to Instagram). You can describe each photo briefly with a caption, as well as order your profile pictures so they appear, well...in a certain order to you and others who view your profile. And that's about it!


Next up is the Questions section. This is what it looks like:

"Any questions?"

I've answered 1,634 questions up until this point in time. Answering Questions is essential because of how you answer them, and how you want others to answer them. It defines you and who you're looking for. It's the largest deciding factor in how you're matched with others, and also generates your personality, which is the next section on the profile. You can see any questions you've already answered and how you answered them, and can even sort through them too--and any questions that are publicly answered (the lock icon in the upper-right remaining unlocked) can be viewed by anyone visiting your profile, should they choose to glance over your Questions profile section.

Here's an example question I answered, both before my answer to the question is confirmed and viewing it after I've answered it. I marked it as Very Important (blue means the option is selected, in the Importance bar).

"Dude, it's just a question..."

When presented with a question (and intend on answering it), you choose a) your answer to the question, b) how you'd like others you're interested in to answer the exact same question, and c) how important the question is to you overall, both with regards to a and b. Answering questions tends to generate more activity on your profile, so answering even just one question every few days can help bolster profile attention--you show up in other peoples' news feeds on their homepages, for example. You never know what can happen!

Here's how it works: You are not forced to answer any questions, but may answer any number of them at any time, one at a time. You may skip questions as they are presented to you. You may re-answer questions you've already answered after 24 hours have passed since you've answered the question. You may add an optional explanation to each question's answer, and may always modify a question's explanation regardless of when the question was answered. Some questions have more limited answer choices, but you can add clarification to all of them. You can only select one single answer choice to any question, but you may specify any number of answers you'd like to see from others regarding that same question. Checking every single box for the latter (or checking Any of the above) will tell the system that you find the question "Not important". You may choose to lock questions, which will make them Private, thus the system will still factor them in when considering who to match you with and what your personality shows as, but others cannot see the answer to the question in...question. Sorry, I had to do it at some point... I'm not sorry at all. :D

Questions range from ones such as the above "Is being 'in-style' with regards to fashion important to you?" to logical brainbusting ones like "Which is the day before the day after yesterday?" to silly ones such as "How do you feel about putting children on leashes?" to the typically expected sex-based questions like "Would you ever be willing to skip out on responsibilities (such as work, school, or such) to stay at home and have sex with someone?" and dating questions like "What's the best conversation material for a first date?"

It's up to you how often you want to answer questions, but they will most certainly help shape your profile and define who you are on OKCupid. But how does it affect your profile relative to others?

Direct your attention to the final fourth tab in the profile, the Personality section! This is defined by several OKCupid factors, but mostly Question answers. Below is mine.

"How, uh...charming."

So (mostly) based on the questions I've answered, this is how OKCupid judges me to be personality-wise. I'd say it's pretty accurate, although I used to have that awesomely huge More Logical positive bar towering over the rest...sigh. Oh well.

Note that you will only see the Personality tab on other peoples' profiles if you have enough in common with them, as decided by the OKCupid matchmaking system!

Browse Matches

If you recall the homepage screenshot from earlier, it's time we tackled big #5. Oh yeah, NUMBAH FIVE! Let's start with the extremely powerful Browse Matches feature.

"All thanks to YOU, and a box of matches!"

This is probably the part guys tend to spend the most time with, no doubt, but just look at all those filters! Setting filters is just as important as leafing through all the match results. Here on the--wait a minute. What's that glowing thing on the right side of my profile? I clicked on the "What's with the glow?" link and...

"All right, listen up! All the fine women on this side, right now!"

Rush hour is when the most number of people are actively using or are on the site at once. This is typically during the evening on weekdays, anywhere between 8-11:30pm (GMT-8) and just about any time on the weekends. This is your chance to get as much attention as possible, because there are more fish in the sea at the time that may be willing to nibble on any bait you might cast into the water. But I don't recommend promoting your profile--it costs money, and more views doesn't necessarily mean anything good unless you know how your profile is being promoted. The prospect of having more users looking at your profile doesn't mean much if it's a result of throwing your money at the screen for a few hours in the spotlight. But hey, I have no experience promoting my profile in such a way. Maybe it's good, who knows?

Anyway, back to matching. Let's re-examine the Match Search page. You get to choose a variety of filters and can apply as many filters as you'd like from the ones given to you. The filters are fairly self-explanatory based on the above image: Age range, distance from you, gender, sexual orientation, whether they're looking for a short- or long-term relationship or just want a fling (yes, that is a filter option!), how often they drink, how frequently they smoke, their height, their religion, their income, diet, ethnicity, astrological sign and even their OKC join date. That isn't the full list, either!

Once you've decided which Match Search parameters you want to search by, you choose how they're displayed. You can display them in a variety of ways:

• Match %
• Enemy %
• Who's new
• Last online (how long ago they were last online, including Online Now)
• Special Blend (OKC randomizes results using a special formula that supposedly tailors to you)
• Match % & Who's new
• Match % & Last online
• Match % & Distance

You can change any of these filters or the display option at any time and search as many times as you want. This is actually a good choice if you have the time and energy (and tolerance!) for it, because new matches may trickle in and out over time each day. There are also a few other search parameters and display choices that most users don't have access to, but...I'll get to that later. You gotta be a member of da club to use those.

You may have also noticed the Bookmarks tab on the Matches page. If you recall the Online Bookmarks section in the homepage screenshot from before, this is where Favoriting someone (which is only possible from their profile, which will be discussed more in the next post when I go over sample profiles) factors in.

Once you get search results and specify how you want them organized, naturally you want to then view the lovely men and/or women that meet those criteria that you hope to be interested in. Here are the first six matches based on the filters and display option I chose (Women, Age 18-32, Online Now, Looking for at least New Friends, Doesn't Smoke, Drinks only socially, rarely or not at all, lives within 25 miles, Highest Match % first):

The funny thing is, they may as well all naturally have blurred faces--that's about as well as I know them based on these previews, anyway.

Of these six women that first turned up in my match search results, I have not seen any of their profiles before. I've seen the same women for months in a row almost every day in my search results back when I was an active OKCupid user, so this is not as unlikely as it seems. But knowing that I have no background information on these women, this is all I'd have to go by if I was trying to decide if I should peer at their profiles: their picture, username, age, location and how compatible they are with me based on two percentages. Which isn't much, sadly.

Oh, and there are the traffic light colors at the very bottom of each match profile preview: Green means this person responds frequently when messaged, yellow means this person responds somewhat often when messaged, and red means they hardly respond when messaged. For example, for women this is extremely skewed: Women get bombarded by a slew of messages compared to men, and they don't usually respond to most of them as they typically aren't fantastic messages worth responding to, so this indicator is not usually very accurate towards the yellow-red side because of the skewed distribution. But if you see someone with a green indicator at the bottom of their profile preview in match search results, that's a good sign. On OKCupid, generally acceptable communication is good. Of course, the color of the indicator doesn't tell you what kinds of responses the person in question generates...that's why if you seem interested in someone based on their profile preview in the match search, you click on their profile and see what they're all about!

When you hover over someone's profile preview in the match search results, you can Like them or hide them from match search results. Liking is something that will be described in the next section. Hiding them from match search results means they will no longer show up in your search results, period. Doesn't matter what filters you use, they are GONE! That is, unless you go to your profile settings and un-Hide them.

If you Like someone's profile, the response indicator is replaced by an indicator that tells you when you last contacted them, and the color changes to grey. If they're Liked and show up in Match results, you will see that you have Liked them. Below shows the same person a) showing up normally in match search results, b) showing up in match search results when already Liked, and c) same as b but with the mouse hovered over the little grey contact indicator.

"I really really really really really really Like you..."

For the sake of this post, I sent this lovely lady a message and Liked her profile. Turns out her profile actually seemed pretty good too, but all that analysis stuff comes in the next post. Speaking of messaging...

Messages

You've got mail! Or rather, lots and lots of mail. Or maybe just 1 or 2. It depends on your gender and how active you are on OKCupid. Let's check out the first view of the Messages page, the Received tab:

Sensitive data withheld for personal reasons!

Hmm, as you can tell by the quantity of empty pictures in my inbox, many of the women I was talking with quit using OKCupid. I guess they either gave up or got boyfriends. The one thing that isn't blurred out in the above picture is my girlfriend's OKCupid username, and I happen to have permission for that one!

Here's an example of what messages look like when clicked on in your inbox. This is a snippet of conversation between me and my not-yet-girlfriend-at-the-time girlfriend on OKCupid:

Girlfriend froze her account, so she shows up as a blank nonexistent profile.

Both Received and Sent tabs look identical, but one contains the messages you've...well, received from others, and the other contains all messages you've sent to others. If it's a conversation, then they will both lead to the same conversation page. You can see that I have an extremely high message storage of 5000 possible messages, that's due to A-List--"da club" I mentioned earlier, and will describe later on in a future post. I still happen to have it for several more months on my account.

The normal message inbox size for a free basic account is 300, at least that's what it was back when I was actively using it to try to catch any woman's eye. Which seems like a lot at first, until you realize that also includes Sent messages too! The good news is that an entire conversation with just one person counts as just a single message. So you're really allotted 300 unique conversations with a free account.

Chats shows which people you've actively chatted with on OKCupid. I would show an image of this view, but I believe since I stopped actively using OKCupid the site has changed how chat works. Now whenever two people are online and have answered each other's messages at least once in the past, they may chat Instant Message style through OKCupid's site. You can always block someone from Instant Messaging you at any time. I believe the Chats page under Messaging no longer shows chat logs, and instead pushes any missed chat messages into your Received inbox. Either way, this is now a very smoothly integrated feature of OKCupid!

Filtered is an especially handy tab for female OKCupid users. It allows you to automatically filter messages out based on specific criteria. I've heard complaints from a fair handful of women about how unhelpful the filter options are. This is about as good as it gets, based on what I'm seeing today:

Now if only we could filter bad words without having to type them...

Clicking on the pencil icon for any of the filters gives you a slider that lets you further customize that particular option. For example, if you want to deflect messages from anyone below 80% Match, you can check the "Filter by Match %" filter and modify the slider to be about 79% (the slider goes between 50% and 90%).

It's clear that these filters are still not perfect. Let's say a woman wants to automatically reject all "hey hows it goin" messages, so she types those four words in. Well, "Filter specific words" doesn't help when most messages contain at least one of the four words "hey", "hows", "it" and "goin". Plus there are multiple ways to (mis)spell those words...and it just goes downhill from there. "Filter by attractiveness" is probably an A-List feature, so ignore that option. Oops.

Visitors

The Visitors page shows who has recently visited your profile. This is the most straightforward of the four side menus:

"You have a visitor! Or thirty."

The Visitors page shows the last 30 people (per page) who have visited your profile. Just like the Browse Matches search results page, you can see who you've Liked or hover your mouse over them and Hide them.

Now because I have A-List on OKCupid, I can browse invisibly. By default with a free account, you automatically notify anyone whose profile you visit, that you visited their profile. This A-List feature is an especially powerful tool for women in particular, not necessarily men--for men to try to talk to a woman without showing signs of visiting her at first? It would come across as a bit stalker-ish. Whereas women can breathe easier knowing that they can visit a male profile and not have the male in question assume she is automatically interested in him.

Quickmatch

Last but certainly not least, we have the Quickmatch page. This page is more similar to Tinder, especially on the mobile OKCupid app (which follows the swiping mechanism pretty closely). Let's get a look at it:

"...cat!"

The way Quickmatch works is as follows. OKCupid provides you with a new lineup of users (right) based on who you're currently looking for, and presents them to you one at a time. You can refresh the page at any time to get a new lineup, although like the Home Matches on the homepage, you should expect some repeats after a while. You get a sneak peak of each person's profile this way, which is more than you see of each profile in Browse Matches without having to actually, officially view profiles. If you don't like the person, press the grey "X". If you do like the person, press the gold star and that will Like them. Either way, the lineup advances and you get to see the next person's profile and pictures. You can still see the last person you examined in Quickmatch to the right of the Like/Not Interested buttons.

An interesting note about Quickmatch that I made use of occasionally: If you pass up someone, their picture now resides next to the "Passed" text to the right of the buttons. However, you can now click on their image and it will send you to their profile! This is a good way to figure out if you really would like someone without having to Like them in order to see more information about them, because the only way to actually view their profile from Quickmatch is to click one of the two buttons to move the lineup along. It's a weird situation, but it works well.

Essentially, Quickmatch is like viewing random matches without notifying those users that you've viewed their profiles, but they show up one at a time on "Special Blend" display mode (OKCupid decides who to show you and in what order).

The last two tabs, Who You Like and Who Likes You, are both similar to the Visitors view. You get to see all the people you've Liked and who has Liked your profile. I believe now it's free to see who has Liked your profile, but back when I was an active OKC user the latter was possible only if you had A-List! Otherwise you could only see how many people had Liked you.

Keep in mind that Likes are not very helpful nor hopeful to anyone besides the one who is doing the Liking. It helps the OKCupid algorithms slightly in figuring out where you fit compared to others, and who is more appropriate to show you when searching matches (if you're showing results based on Match %). Liking a certain number of people helps new users to unlock other OKCupid free account features, only further muddying the Like system. Very rarely will two people actually Like each other on the site and seriously mean it.

Conclusion

OKCupid seems pretty straightforward mechanically. The features make plenty of sense, and users are granted immense freedom. It's easy to surmise that most of the activity that goes on is arduous repetition, like I hinted at in the first post. In the next post, I'm going to analyze sample profiles and identify many trends that roam the Cupid Streets. I'll also share some personal stories and describe what I did in an attempt to make sense of an illogical battlefield. And we will see just how brutal the OKCupid rollercoaster can be--even with all these great tools that come with the immensely free sandbox territory.

And boy, can it be brutal.