Online Dating - Can a ‘Personality Test’ really help?
When we were first looking at the online dating market, we did a lot of research into the different styles of dating websites to see which was the most effective. The only way to run a successful dating business is to have the best rate of matching people together, so we wanted to make sure that we chose the most effective way when we started.
The biggest ‘fad’ in online dating at the moment is the personality test,
used by sites like eHarmony and chemistry.com, which claim to use ‘scientific’ personality testing to match you with someone you are likely to have a long term relationship with. However, they have never published any information to support the fact that these actually work! eHarmony claims that you have a 1 in 500 chances of marrying your matches, so if you were matched with two people a week it could take years before you met someone.
We spoke to people who had tried to sign up for eHarmony and chemistry.com. One thing we kept hearing was ‘I spent an hour filling in the questionnaire, and then it said that I wasn’t suitable for the website’ and ‘I spent an hour filling in the questionnaire and after I paid found I only had a couple of matches, with people I wasn’t interested in’. Time and time again we found that the majority of people weren’t satisfied with the service being provided by these questions, especially because they had to pay to message the people that they had been ‘scientifically matched’ with.
People look for different things in a partner. Some people want someone they can be comfortable with, some people want to be challenged on a date and some people like partying with their dates. An arbitrary personality test might try to account for this, but in the end is going to lend towards trying to match a certain kind of person. People told us that they wanted more chances to talk to people, more chances to see their photos and more chances to make sure for themselves that they thought that they would have fun, instead of having a hidden formula tell them what they would enjoy.
We did some research of our own, to try to find out if eHarmony had published any of their results in a scientific way, but all we could find were people criticizing the company for not letting anyone review their results in a proper scientific fashion. Yet they claim to be using the latest in ‘scientific matchmaking’.
We didn’t think that these ‘personality tests’ could ever reliably match people, so we built a 100% free site which focusses on communication and pictures, letting you decide for yourself who you think you would be happy with.
