Why is Dating Culture “Dead”?

Beyond our own frustrations, we wanted to pinpoint exactly why Stanford students so often describe the dating culture as "dead". Through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, we uncovered recurring themes.

• Overwhelm and superficiality: “Dating apps just feel like endless swiping. You’re supposed to care, but it’s so exhausting.”

• Fear of vulnerability: “Everyone’s so busy acting chill. It’s like admitting you want to date is embarrassing.”

• Choice paralysis: “I match with people, but I never know what to say or how to start something real.”

• Lack of community: “It’s awkward. There’s no social momentum to make dating feel normal here.”

These issues contribute to a recurring theme that existing matching services such as the Marriage Pact, Tinder, Hinge, etc share: most matches aren’t acted upon meaningfully, and as such, either remain completely dormant or slowly languish as both parties lose interest. 

In our next step, to promote engagement between matches, we must understand how successful connections are made and how they lead to first dates/meet-ups.

We asked questions to:

• Understand how to “Break the Ice” effectively. We learned that participants usually respond positively to conversation prompts tied to specific details in profiles (specific photos, commenting on activities, inviting challenge, questions). Our hypothesis is that friction is reduced through authentic interest.

• Learn how in-app match conversations are made meaningful. We learned that conversations are used to "sus" out if the match is a decent person, and meaningful conversations make the user interested using specific contextual questions that invite challenge.

• Study how in-app convos are successfully transitioned into first dates/meet-ups. We learned that conversations transition into dates successfully through discretely commenting on photos/interests, with clear meetup time/location.

• Learn about how dating in real life is different from online dating. We learned that users tend to prefer knowing or having people to tell you about a romantic interest, and this serves as a vetting process to consider compatibility.

  
  

Prototyping and testing: what works for Stanford?

• Onboarding: we designed a series of self-explorative questions, tested their tone, and refined them to feel approachable.

• Friend feedback: we created low-fi prototypes for early versions of friend involvement. Our friends said they felt invasive, so we shifted to a lightweight recommendation flow.

• Icebreaking tools: users loved the idea of built-in conversation prompts but wanted flexibility, so we included suggested prompts and a free-write field.

We conducted multiple rounds of usability testing before building our final app using React Native.

Introducing… Wing.

Wing is a dating platform that opens up dating culture by making it social, focusing on quality matches, meaningful connections, and leveraging users’ friend networks. Here’s how Wing works:

1. Limited, curated Matches: Instead of endless swiping, Wing delivers a few curated matches each Friday.

2. User personalisation: Users answer self-explorative questions that help Wing’s algorithm deeply understand their preferences and values. This data enables the platform to recommend compatible profiles, called "Wing matches."

3. Friend-driven Recommendations: Friends play a central role by reviewing profiles and recommending matches. This collaborative process fosters trust and provides human insight that algorithms alone cannot offer.

"I would use Wing even though I haven't used dating apps before because I will know more personal information about the way the person thinks before meeting them in real life, making it more likely for us to get along. I also enjoy that it is like a social media app and I get to see who my friends are dating, it also means we won’t accidentally overlap."

"I really don’t like dating apps, you know that, but my friends would be all over an app like this, and they were the only reason I was on Tinder. I’d way rather be on Wing and be able to be closer to my friends on the app."

"What I am most excited about is the matching feature: personality + human elements rather than going with surface-level looks. It is easy to fake who you are on other apps and lie, but on Wing that is very difficult and people are going to be a lot more honest."