Ask HN: Please provide feedback on our soon-to-launch dating site and widget

Thanks for the great feedback. :)

We've done lots of user testing so far and get different impressions. The front page image will definitely change and be A/B tested to death once we launch-- it's just what we've got so far.

Note that we're hoping the front page won't be the first thing people see when they encounter YB-- they'll hopefully see it first via the widget on their friends MySpace profile, etc.

Thanks again for the great feedback.

I agree with this. I didn't click the link because I assumed it was either a porn site or an Easter Bunny / Chocolate thing... or even Easter Bunny porn! Really I had no idea what it might be about.

And yeah, matching on looks seems frankly bizarre. Perhaps as a bit of fun, in a hot-or-not way, to construct the most appropriate couples... but actual dating? No.

Agree with you on the name -- "yum" conjures up something delectable while "bunny" makes me think "Playboy Bunny." It connotes a sort of superficiality that would lead me to choose a different dating site.

I'm not sure which creeps me out more, the name or the stock photo. I think both need to go.

Unlike other misadventures in naming, with a dating site your users must trust you. It's sudden death there if you mess that up. Even something which registers subconsciously or ambiguously as, "This site is for creeps." will make you dead in the water, which really, in the grand scheme of the amount of work that goes into setting something up, would be a silly reason to do poorly.

These are some great comments. Thanks so much for your time/review/thoughts.

The site is more of an introduction/matchmaking site. I only billed it as a "dating" site in the link I submitted to HNYC because that's kind of the niche it fits in.

Business model: We're testing this out initially to see how it goes. We will be adding location/nearness, but that's not used initially until we reach a critical mass. We definitely weren't trying to hide our messaging costs-- we just didn't want to dissuade people who are just curious from at least getting on the site and seeing matches. I don't want people to get confused and think it costs any money whatsoever to use/match/vote with our site or widgets. We'll keep that impression in mind and do our best to find a better middleground.

Moderation: I 100% agree. We're definitely going to be moderating these pictures before inclusion (a day or two after launch). If you saw a nonhuman it was one of our left-over test images-- we have to track that one down. Sorry about that and thanks for mentioning it.

Facebook: The entire backend is designed to work well as MySpace/Facebook/iPhone apps-- so that's soon on the radar. We wanted to start with the core site and build from there.

On opening the page: We saw that a bit in user testing, too-- so we added the "arrow" and some initial flash animation to encourage clicking. We'll be watching how people handle this and adapting-- thanks for mentioning.

Your other points I absolutely agree with, too-- we'll work on those.

Thanks again!

Thanks for the feedback so quickly!

Regarding looks: Sure, looks are superficial ways to recommend matches, but that's just to get the conversation started (as it is on every dating website, pretty much ever). There's also a key here that you don't get while searching on a traditional site: (in theory) people will recommend matches for you that are actually somewhat attainable rather than everyone drowning the hottest people in contact requests. This should get people closer to more likely matches than they'd get otherwise.

Looks absolutely matter-- and while it is superficial, it's clear that this is what people base first impressions on. We're not looking to be highbrow-- we're looking to help people meet those they'd look good with. I personally agree that I'd hesitate a little, but we tried to find a middleground without going overboard. We'll keep an eye on that, though-- thanks for the feedback there.

As for matchmaking: The idea is for friends to play matchmaker as much/more than random people-- after you signup, you're given a personal widget that matches you up with potential people. And you would send it to friends, embed in your MySpace profile, etc.

For example: http://www.yumbunny.com/public/3FDdUkHKSrSzDy2njcF28u/

Thanks again for the great feedback, keep it coming.

Humans are superficial. Hot or Not was a ridiculously huge success for this reason.

Looks like a good site idea to me, as long as they design to keep down their customer support costs.

What about a 30-second introductory video instead of a picture? I would trust those results much more.

That Facebook idea sounds like a lot of fun! Good idea.

Great feedback-- we can definitely do that. We went with the more superficial approach to catch people's attention initially and try to raise some eyebrows. I do think I would also prefer to date on a website not exactly termed this way, too-- but we're definitely going to be doing a good bit of testing to see what resonates best. This is our first best guess. :)

Yeah, the matchmaker problem we're attacking this way:

* Coming soon, stats/points/levels for matchmakers.

* Users ask their friends to matchmaker for them specifically, and we interleave other matches once in a while to spread out the love.

So far we've had a lot of non-single people who just loved to play matchmaker, so we're hoping that will continue/carry-over as well.

Thanks for the great feedback-- if you have other ideas on increasing matchmakers, we'd love to hear them!

There are lots of fun problems in this-- our matching algorithm at the moment is not super complex. Once we have more feedback/data, we will constantly tweak, but the starting plan is to make more successful matchmakers weighed slightly higher over time. And obviously if by random chance two people recommend each other for each other, that'd get a pretty strong rating.

We send matches to the users every week, so we're expecting we don't have to be spot on perfect each week.

Some of the more interesting problems we solved was trying to make this widget as fast and scalable as possible. It's fed entirely from Amazon SQS queues and so has no database access what-so-ever. The entire architecture is designed to scale easily over multiple servers in stages as we need.

Fun stuff all around. Thanks for the feedback!

We want rapid clicking to be fast. Abuse isn't going to be super common because people are going to be bored.

Also "No" doesn't count against anything in our matching algorithm. It's basically just not recommending them for a match. Spamming yes/maybe would end up being averaged out.

We definitely are going to keep track of the best matchmakers in a coming version so we can weigh their pieces better (and also give them some rank/etc to encourage them to make matches).

Thanks for the kind words and great feedback.