A few years ago, Gen Z crossed 50% of our user base. We had two options: keep building for the audience we’d designed for originally, or actually rebuild around who was showing up. We rebuilt.
The easy read on Gen Z is “instant gratification”: short attention spans, low patience, always scrolling. I think that read is lazy and mostly wrong. What we actually saw was a generation with a genuinely higher processing speed for information, paired with an unusually low tolerance for anything that feels performative or inauthentic. Slow isn’t cautious to them. Slow reads as fake.
Three things we changed:
Rapid-Fire UX. We rebuilt our interface around how Gen Z actually searches and browses, not how the previous generation of users did. That single shift produced a 550% increase in matches compared to 2020.
The Privacy Paradox. Gen Z wants to express themselves openly and be protected at the same time, which sounds contradictory until you build for both simultaneously. We leaned into higher-tier verification as a feature, not a friction point, treating “verified” as something that lets people be more open, not less.
Concierge Dating. My read on where this goes next: dating apps start acting less like a search engine and more like a concierge. AI handles the tedious mechanics, building out a profile, surfacing better matches, so the human spends their time on the part that actually requires being human: the conversation itself.
If you’re building a consumer product and still designing for how a slightly older generation behaves, you’re optimizing for a market that’s shrinking. The habits and expectations shift underneath you whether you plan for it or not.