Bumble Expands ‘Opening Moves’ and Interest Filters

Despite always operating under the idea of letting women make the first move, Bumble has launched an expansion through the Opening Moves feature that allows any user to quickly prompt a new match. This improved feature provides users with up to three prompts to send as a pseudo-message, with the recipient being able to choose which one they’d like to respond to.

Bumble’s spokesperson said these updates are a direct result of user feedback. Chat initiation has increased by around 26 percent since the initial rollout of Opening Moves, with an around 77 percent increase in quality conversations globally. Bumble considers “quality conversation” to be one where both people engage with interest in progressing the chat, resulting in higher cadence and length of messages being sent, according to the spokesperson.

Given the changes they made, this makes sense. The new Opening Moves feature allows users to “pitch” some conversation topics, then gives the recipient a choice of which to focus on. This makes it easier for conversations to start off comfortably for both parties, meaning that users can jump right into a specific topic instead of having to go through the same conversation starters with every match.

A big part of this change was to combat dating fatigue – the semi-recent signs of users losing interest in dating platforms due to how repetitive they can feel when you aren’t receiving any long-term matches. New filtering options by interest are also part of the expansion, alongside 30 additional interest categories, such as houseplants, mocktails, and memes – meaning that users have the option to filter the kind of matches they’re looking for.