Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Cornell Business Analytics will once again play cupid with its relaunch of Perfect Match, an online survey designed to help students find an on-campus date.
Participants fill out a short questionnaire about their personal information, preferences and personality to receive a “perfect match” on Feb. 12.
First launched in February of last year, four students developed its iteration, taking barely over a week to actually develop the concept. But the quickly produced survey still proved to be a big hit, garnering around 4,097 responses.
This year, with double the members, Cornell Business Analytics began planning in fall semester, starting development in November.
With this extra time, the developers were better able to flesh out the design and created an improved website — that so far has attracted even more people than last year. As of Sunday evening, 4,183 students have taken the survey, which does not close until Feb. 11, according to its homepage.
“The landing page is more minimalist and clean,” Shivali Halabe ’22, design lead for Perfect Match, told The Sun. “We [also] created a statistics page from the data that we collected last year and used it to create interactive graphs where people can look at trends we found most interesting.”
The team also worked to improve the overall experience of the survey. By customizing the survey page, Cornell Business Analytics added a new feature that allows respondents to edit their answers after submitting the survey.
However, the most significant change made was the “Crush Match” option. With this option, students can list up to three people they have a crush on. If a student’s crush reciprocates, then the survey will pair the two together.
With 35 percent of students entering at least one crush, this feature has been widely used, according to Jamal Hashim ’22, Perfect Match development lead. Hashim described the feature as “the coolest thing we added.”
Despite these improvements, Hashim wished the group could have included a feature to prevent awkward matches — such as exes — which Hashim described as “forbidden pairs.”
“Forbidden pairs is [a feature] we wish we had done … we just didn’t think about it at the time,” Hashim said. “It would have been extremely easy to do, too.”
Halabe also felt the supplementary pages could have been more interactive — she particularly wished they made the contact information more accessible on the website. The design lead hopes to make these web pages more user friendly and interesting in the future.
For students worried about ghosting, Hashim said this doesn’t really happen — 70 percent of matches reached out to each other after taking the survey last year.
Cornell Business Analytics will host an event to allow matches to meet at Kennedy Hall’s eHub at 6 p.m. on Valentine’s Day.