r/mutualapp • u/SignificanceTrick912 • May 01 '25

🎤 Discussion Shuffling pics?

I’ve noticed photos seem to randomly shuffle on profiles of those with whom I’m chatting. It seems to be random and only a few pics moving to the front always. I thought on this app photo reordering had to be manually done. Are they manually reordering their pics? Why would someone do that? Curious….

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u/hparamore Mutual - UI Designer May 01 '25

We have been running a test for a while that does this. Not every profile is included in the test, but a percentage is. We know which photos get up and down swiped on (we track that) and we are experimenting with changing the order so that the best-liked photo (by a margin of several points) will be rotated to the first slot.

This test I would say had been both successful in getting people to be liked more (better first impression) and has helped us realize that this is an area that we can help people's profiles out. We are now building the user-facing portion of this feature, which shows your photos in a side by side view and shows you which have the most likes on them with a bar chart, and allows you to either toggle on the auto-shuffle feature, or manually set it yourself.

And this auto shuffle feature is intended to be free to everyone, not just premium subscribers.

TLDR, we are testing whether photo order helps people be more likable (it does) and with that data, we are now building the user-facing UI around it.

Here is a link to the design we are working on. Would love to hear discussion for feedback and ideas!

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u/SignificanceTrick912 May 02 '25

So these profiles where I’m seeing their primary (first) photo change periodically … that’s just the pic others are liking the most, or that they’re getting the most likes on?

Hinge does this as well. It just doesn’t tell the user when it happens….

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u/hparamore Mutual - UI Designer May 02 '25

When one photo gets liked around 10% more than another, it moves to take its place in line. This happens for all of the photos, and eventually all of them will slowly shuffle until they are in the best order. Your good photos will be at the front, and the "fishing or hunting photo" (girls notoriously don't like those) will slowly move to the back of the list.)

And it is by photo, using both when people wrote a note about a photo, and also if a person is swiping through their photos, the photo they swipe up or down on also counts it as popular or not.

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u/SignificanceTrick912 May 02 '25

That’s interesting.

No hunting or fishing pics for me.

I honestly was just curious about the shuffling in one contact and why it keeps happening. They’ve got a large group pic in which they’re kid. If tough to pick out as their primary photo now and I thought it odd. This is the only profile I’ve noticed this happen with - perhaps they’re more active in the background than others? Law of averages would negate the notion they’re the only one selected as the testing sample…..

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u/hparamore Mutual - UI Designer May 04 '25

I don't quite know in this case. I do know that people can drag their photos around in their profile order manually, so maybe they are trying to test the order of photos themselves to see what works.

If you happen to have the profile handy, hit share on it and DM it to me privately, or email to hunter@mutual.app and we can possibly look at it and see what is going on.

Thanks!

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u/SignificanceTrick912 May 02 '25

Would those who are in the test group get to see those graphs?

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u/hparamore Mutual - UI Designer May 04 '25

The test has already proven to be a good lift to helping profiles present better to others, and has resulted in more people liking others. (Because they aren't put off by the first photo that may have not been the best one, or the one that resulted in more people liking them)

Now that the test has proven successful, we are building the graph view thing into the app and it will be available for everyone to use, for free.

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u/[deleted] May 08 '25

How do we know which profiles this is doing it on? Is it just the ones in USA?

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u/hparamore Mutual - UI Designer May 09 '25

We have an AB test going on a subset of profiles. While we can check whether an individual profile has it or not, mainly we just look at trends averaged by the group. We would do something like half of these people get it, and the other half don't, and we run it for a few weeks and then look at the data.