Thursday, May 31, 2007

About photo captions

Fairly recently, eHarmony started letting people put captions on their photos.

I've experimented pretty extensively with this feature. The things that I've tried?
  • Descriptive captions, with dates
  • Captions that make jokes
  • No captions at all
My results?

My "joke" captions didn't work at all. My results got markedly worse. So don't do that.

The differences between the descriptive captions/no captions trials were subtle.

When I used descriptive captions with dates, a few women got the subtle hint that their photos had to be recent... so they changed them, or added their own date captions. But it was a very subtle difference.

But, on the other hand, when I went with no captions, I got a lot more questions about the pictures. And, from that, I believe that I raised a little more intrigue.

So, between those two, it's a tossup, and depends on which you value more - raising intrigue, or getting slightly better quality pictures.

Personally, I'm sticking to "no captions".

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