by Paul Glenn, Emily Witt, Andrea Gagliano and Max Curran
Final project for INFO 247 - Information Visualization at the UC Berkeley School of Information
Motivated by our own and friends’ experiences using online dating services, our goals for this project revolved around improving the experience of users of these websites and apps. We chose OkCupid in particular because of it’s popularity and its use of a matching algorithm. As we discuss in our related work, algorithms are often implemented on behalf of users without users understanding their inner workings. Thus, our first goal in this project was to design a visualization that brings some transparency to OkCupid algorithm that is used as a basis for forming meaningful human connections.
Also in the realm of online dating, we were aware of a variety of recent news and research reports indicating a high prevalence of prejudice in online dating environments. While we recognize it isn’t ours or anyone’s place to decide who people date, we wanted to encourage users of online dating services to more deeply consider the preferences they use to determine their potential matches. Our second goal then was to have our project serve as a gentle nudge against prejudice in online dating practices by allowing users to play around with preference settings and explore the effects on their pool of matches.
Our final goal was for ourselves: we wanted to implement a creative design based on thoughtful user research using the tools and concepts we’ve learned and practiced throughout this course.
The project is available for view at http://howmanyfish.herokuapp.com and a full write-up describing the project, related work, user research and implementation details is available in this repository as FinalProject.pdf, and online here.
Other projects from the same course can be viewed on the course website