Contrived scarcity could drive the next generation of dating apps

The dustbin of internet history contains many gems and one of my all time favourites is This Is My Jam. Way back in 2012 NME pondered whether this was the ‘future of music sharing online’…..well no, is the answer time has given us, but they were right that the start-up was onto something special.

The format was simple — you could post one song at any one time that was your Jam at that point. You could post as often or as little as you liked, every hour, every other week, whenever you felt like it. But you could only have one Jam at a time, and that was the USP. You would follow people, and they you, like twitter, and so your feed would gradually get populated with new Jams posted by people you follow.

This start-up epitomises the idea of ‘contrived scarcity’ in product design. There is no economic reason for the limit of one Jam per day — its not like the website is about to crash. And the scarcity is completely central to the product experience — the foundational feature of the start-up itself. It’s definitely not a freemium thing — as if you could pay $10 per month to post five Jams simultaneously. No, the scarcity is the product is the company.

Why does the feature matter so much? Because by creating this constraint it forces every user to think really hard about what song is the most important song to them right now in the world. This really makes you pause — you have one song to speak to the world, what’s it going to be? What song defines you, at this point in time? You filter through all the songs in your head to find to just one, one!, that you really think the world needs to hear right now. All the essence of the product is contained in that unprepossessing little button ‘CHANGE MY JAM’ — each time you do it you are making a statement about yourself, and about music.

The more contemporary examples of this ‘contrived scarcity’ idea are Tik Tok, with 15 second videos, and arguably Snapchat with 10 second disappearing messages. These features are the product; they’re the first thing you tell a friend when describing how it works, and they are the driving force of the product’s success. The contrived scarcity acts as a forcing function for the extracting or imparting of ‘value’ in some sense. For Tik Tok, it has created the most pithy form of entertainment the world has ever seen — ideally suited to our age of short attention spans — and led to an entirely new sub-culture of creativity in the form of Tik Tok memes.

So to dating apps. Tinder, which ushered in a new era in how people thought about dating online, is not far off a decade old now. The descendents of Tinder — Bumble, Hinge etc — have not iterated much on the core format of ‘swipe and message’, tinkering around the edges with features such as ‘girl messages first’. These are very much incremental design improvements.

Will the 2020s see the emergence of a new primitive in dating apps? Perhaps we will all date in VR worlds soon enough, hanging out in virtual bars? But a half-step evolution in the current — slightly stale now — primitive, could be the introduction of contrived scarcity to the product experience.

What would this look like in an app like Hinge or Bumble? Chucking out some ideas:

• Cap the number of people you can be messaging with simultaneously, say to 3–5
• Cap the length of message you can send, say to 100 characters
• Cap the number of people you can ‘Like’ per day, say to five or ten (with no option to buy more)
• Constrain the keyboard you can use to only emojis, or only gifs, or only songs.
• Constrain the amount of time you have to write the message — maybe you have a window to type in that will disappear after 60 seconds.

What effect would these have on the product experience?

Cap the number of people you can be messaging with simultaneously, say to 3–5: This would be a profound change. Before you could start chatting with someone new you would have to let someone else go; it would therefore act as a forcing function to express how you’re feeling about each of your current chats so far. Like continually checking in with your latest preferences, a regular reshuffle that forces you to express where your head is at. It wouldn’t be easy, but the advantage would be that for each of the five chats you do have active, you are really invested in them, and this would dramatically increase the likelihood of a replies. That would go a long way to helping fix one of the scourges of the modern dating app experience (for both genders) which is unanswered messages — essentially a form of rejection that is not even graced with any kind of explicit notification, it is rejection by absence, something akin to ‘micro-ghosting’. This is the default form of of rejection on dating apps today — no reply after a day or two.

Constrain the amount of time you have to write the message: This would force a more natural, authentic and expressive form of communication, which would help people to get to know each other faster. Again this is hard work, it would be pretty stressful (to some more than others probably) but it there is real value in getting to know someone more deeply, more quickly, on dating apps — it is the depth that allows you to make a decision about whether you want to continue to a date. The forcing function again here drives real value, which is ultimately to help you go on first dates that are better qualified, and therefore a better use of your time. People might be willing to make this trade.

In both these cases this is hard work for the user, really quite demanding on them, but that is the essence of constrained scarcity — it somehow levers something of value out of the users’ head and into the product itself, and en-mass that value permeates through the experience playing back to everyone who is participating in it. It creates a product experience that is qualitatively different and better than the alternatives, and if users think this is worth the hit on their hard work then the product has a chance of flying. The art is in crafting a product experience that gets this equation is exactly right — leveraging the hard work of the user to generate as much value back to them as possible.