Hinge dating app breaks the ice by matching experiences as conversation starters

Unless your dating game is strong, matchmaking apps can be a minefield of regret and missed opportunities. Swiping right is the easy part, but what do you do once you find a match you actually like?

Hinge has taken it upon itself to help users break the ice. A new update to the dating app attempts to find out more about users through a series of yes or no questions, the answers to which will be used to find the most unique experiences users have in common.

The questions range from whether you’ve missed a flight to places you’ve been travelling, and if you’ve been suspended from school. Users can answer as many or as few questions as they wish. Once you match with someone on the app, the most exceptional life experience you both share will be displayed in order to help you get the conversation started.

In case you’re not familiar with the service, Hinge is built upon the concept of matching users to friends of friends via your Facebook details (taking Tinder’s mutual friends feature to its logical extreme).

“I think that dating is all about finding a connection, some mutual interest or shared experience,” Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of Hinge, told ABC News. “We’re trying to really help people get to that level as quickly as possible.”

During the test phase of the new feature, Hinge claims that users answered approximately 120 questions in their first week, reports ABC News. This indicates that people were more than willing to return to the feature in order to find more common interests with a larger variety of candidates. The top experiences people shared included attending Mardi Gras, having left-wing political inclinations, and being suspended from school respectively.

Hinge plans to keep updating the database of questions in order to keep things relevant. Future queries could regard new movies, among other experiences.