HowAboutWe.com Dating Site Review

Overview

HowAboutWe.com bills itself as the OFFline Dating Site. HowAboutWe wants to encourage their users to spend less time online and more time meeting each other in the real world by placing focus on the dates themselves. Throw out on the site what you feel like doing on a date and see who might be interested in going with you or try to find interested members yourself. The point is to get offline and have fun in the real world.

HowAboutWe… Sign Up

Signing up for HowAboutWe.com is pretty easy. You’ll start by identifying for the site your sexuality and gender. Then, for verification purposes, you’ll provide your zip code, birthdate, a user name, and an email and site password. This is all followed up by some specific questions to let other user know the person you are. They’ll ask for your occupation, education, politics and faith, along with the level of importance those things are for you. You may also detail your own ethnicity, whether or not you have any children, your height, and your exercise, drinking and smoking habits. The last step in signing up is to upload a photo of yourself, and they make it easy for you by allowing you to copy over a photo from your Facebook account as well as uploading one from your computer. Next you’ll be asked to jump right in to the HowAboutWe’s primary selling point by posting a date idea. This will consist of some kind of activity you and your date would do. As you’d expect, the framing of these ideas starts in the form of “How about we…” followed by the date idea. It’s a simple idea and very easy for people to wrap their head around.

After you post your first date idea, the site will ask you a few more open ended questions about yourself for you to fill out in detail if you like. Questions like, “My perfect Sunday would be…” and “If I won the lottery and quit my job, I would…”. There are over a dozen of these fun questions you can spend some time on. These are pretty fun things for people to read, but take care to not be too detailed. Answer the questions, but you don’t have to be too specific on why. It can make for good conversation material later on if the other person is curious about the nature of your answers.

HowAboutWe… Check Out The Website

The first section you’ll see once you’ve completed the signup process is called The Pool. It’s also referred to as Speed Date as well. The Pool is a game on the site where you can quickly express interest in going on suggested dates. You’ll be presented with member profile pictures and their date ideas one-by-one on what amounts to slides that travel from right to left. This is called the date stream. You are prompted to respond to the date idea with one of two buttons. An “X” button which means you’re not interested in the idea or and a “heart” button which means you are interested in the date idea. Also provided are the member’s username, age, gender, sexuality and location. For those a little more curious about the member being presented, each slide is clickable and will take you over to that member’s full profile. Regardless of the choice you make, each click will scroll the slide along over to the next member and their date idea. It’s designed to allow you to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time and is a quick way to let other users know you’re intrigued, and if you’re not interested, they’ll never know.

The next section is called Connections. I’d describe this as a more focused version of The Pool. On Connections you’re presented with profiles and date ideas one-by-one again, but instead of just being populated with members from the general “Pool” of members, this shows a more tailored list of 12 members based on your specific preferences and HowAboutWe’s matchmaking algorithm. This process is not transparent at all so I can’t really speak to how these members are determined. Once you’ve gone through the list, you’re provided with a list of connections based on who you’ve picked. If any of the members you’ve “hearted”, did the same on your profile as well, a connection has been made.

HowAboutWe… Search For Dates

The feature you’ll notice initially that sets HowAboutWe’s search apart from most other dating sites is the ability to search by keyword. This is a pretty handy feature that allows another level of filtering your search and compliments the date idea focus of the website. There are also 5 default keyword searches you can try; Eat, Drink, Listen/Watch, Play and Explore. I found that just trying out different keywords helped me come up with my own date ideas too.

More traditional search features available are sexuality, gender, age, location range, height, politics, education, faith, ethnicity, outlook on kids, and exercising frequency, drinking frequency, and smoking frequency. With all these choices, it’s nice that they allow you to save any particular search you’ve made to use at a later time if you want. The results are sorted by “Recently Active” by default, which makes a lot of sense. The availability of some date ideas are often time sensitive so the most recent date ideas are traditionally your best bet. Clicking on any of these results will send you over to their user profile.

HowAboutWe… Look At Profiles

Taking a look at the user profiles on HowAboutWe, they’re pretty much like the ones you’ll find on most online dating sites. A good profile photo, obviously very important and goes a long way towards success anywhere. You can upload a photo by visiting your profile and scrolling to the “My Photos” section on your own profile page. From there, select “Upload a Photo” from your computer or import from Facebook. You’ll want to upload a variety of photos. The more photos you post, the better your chances of getting responses. You need to have at least one photo to be shown to other users. When you scroll over a picture, you also have the option to delete that image or make it your profile picture. Keep in mind that photos are necessary for success. They don’t show picture-less profiles in the date stream, meaning you'll barely get any responses. HowAboutWe posits the more pictures you post, the better. People who have at least three photos get twice as many messages as people with only one photo.

When you visit a member’s profile, along with the information that they’ve filled it out with, you’ll also have a few options. You can message them directly. Also, there’s an “Ask Her/Him Out” button as well. This is used to send a private “How about we…” date idea that only that specific user will see and will not be posted to the public date stream. You can also “favorite” any profiles you may want to revisit at another time. Think of these as bookmarks, you can go back and refer to in the favorites section of your account.

The unique feature for profiles on HowAboutWe is the date ideas section. On your own profile, this section has 3 parts; Dates In Play, Private Dates, and Out Of Play. Dates In Play lists and lets you edit date ideas you’ve posted out to the community. Private Dates are a listing of all the Private date ideas you have sent so far. If for some reason, one of your date ideas is no longer an option for you, you can put your ideas into the Out Of Play area. When you’re viewing someone else’s date ideas section, they will have two parts: Go On One Of Her Dates and Choose From My Dates. The first lists their own date ideas with the ability to message the member or show interest in their date ideas. Showing interest in someone’s date idea is handled by using the “I’m Intrigued” button. When you click “I'm Intrigued,” the site sends a short message to that user letting him or her know that you are intrigued by their date. Intrigues let people know you’re interested, so you can start a more serious conversation through messaging later on. The second part lets you choose from your own list of date ideas and then use that idea to “Ask Her Out”

HowAboutWe… Talk About Date Ideas

I always recommend suggesting something that you’d actually like to do. You'll have a better time and you're much more likely to connect with someone who you'll really get along with. I’d also suggest being more specific. I found that I have received much more responses to “How About We… go see Back To The Future at this awesome little art house theater I know downtown,” than “How About We… go to the movies.”

When you post a date on HowAboutWe, a couple things happen. The first is other users are able to find your date idea in their own date stream or by searching for dates. Secondly, HowAboutWe uses their own matching algorithm to send your date idea by email to people who might like it. In the end, it’s not something to stress over. You’re not being tested so it’s best to pick and activity that sounds cool to you and post it. During my time with the site, I’ve just posted date ideas as they’ve come to me.

HowAboutWe… Subscription Benefits and Costs

Like pretty much all websites in the dating space, your level of access to the site will be dependent on the subscription plan you go with. As a free subscriber you can post dates ideas and browse through the date ideas posted by other members as well as browse through the trending date ideas at the time. You’re also free to fill out your profile and check out other profiles, but the most you can interact with an individual member is limited to hitting the “I’m Intrigued” button. This free access is for checking out HowAboutWe.com to give you a sense of things and help you decide if it’s for you. In order to gain full messaging capabilities and other benefits, you'll need to upgrade your account.

Basic Plans

• $9.99/month for a 12 month subscription
• $12.99/month for a 6 month subscription
• $15.99/month for a 3 month subscription
• $34.99/month for a 1 month subscription

Basic members can send unlimited messages to any user, receive and read unlimited messages, read new messages in their own email, see when their messages have been read, view visitors to their profile, receive priority customer service, and turn off billing renewal to avoid unwanted payments.

Premium Plans

• $13.99/month for a 12 month subscription (Includes 100% money back guarantee)
• $17.99/month for a 6 month subscription (Includes 100% money back guarantee)
• $21.99/month for a 3 month subscription

Premium members get all the features of a basic member with a few additions. Premium members get featured more on the date stream so they get viewed more than other users. They also have the option of browsing members anonymously. If you want, you can change your Username whenever you like as a premium member. Lastly, ads on the site are removed for premium members as well. They also offer a 100% Offline Guarantee. If you don’t get offline on real dates by the end of your subscription, HowAboutWe will refund you.

When it comes to other refunds, you are eligible for a refund within 3 days of any transaction. If you’d like a refund, you can email them at refund@howaboutwe.com with the reason for your refund request. Refunds are reflected in your account within 5 business days. Auto-renewal fees are not refunded if requested more than 3 days after billing. If you wish to turn off auto-renew, simply visit Settings and adjust your account on the bottom. If you deactivate your account before your subscription term has ended, you forfeit the remainder of your subscription term, and will not be refunded for the unused time.

HowAboutWe… Get To The Point

At the end of the day, HowAboutWe brings a logical and easy to digest hook to the online dating space. The mood is a very casual one that showcase’s the ideas of the people using it to encourage real world, offline connections. I’d recommend this site for people who are comfortable with meeting new people and open to trying out lots of different activities.