Top 10 Usability Mistakes on Match.com

I have been a user of Match.com for some time, and the site has a number of usability issues that have long bothered me. This list explains the ten biggest problems on the site that affect members.

Watch the usability test video:

Video summary and suggestions:

1. Some links look like text; some text looks like links that look like text. Links should always look like links and text should always look like text. The link to the members' profile on Match's search results however doesn't look like a link. In fact, it looks exactly the same as the heading text. On the list of winks, the username doesn't link to the profile even though it should. Worse, it looks exactly the same as the username on the search result and that does link to the profile. 2. Profile views show different numbers in different locations. Members can see two different "profile views" statistics, and the difference between them isn't clear. One of them tends to be about 15% of the other, so maybe this smaller figure represents the number of views in the last month or week? 3. Logged in members are taken to the marketing home page. Click on the Match.com logo after logging in and users expect to be taken to their home page. Instead, they're taken to the Match.com marketing home page that was designed to attract new members. If they're already members, why do they need to see this page? 4. The username on the mailbox doesn't link to the member profile. Users cannot access the profile of the person who wrote to them directly from the mailbox. Instead, they have to open the email first in order to click to the profile. 5. Search demands information already submitted. Searching should be as easy as possible. Match, however, requires information already entered such as gender and age range. That makes searching a bit tedious. 6. Clicking on photos requires scrolling to see the results. If someone has more than 3-4 photos, clicking on the thumbnails at the bottom means that the only way to see the large photo is to scroll upwards. Yahoo! Personals places the thumbnails on the right and the large photo on the left, a better solution. 7. Clicking the photo opens a new window. Clicking the large photo, opens the image in a completely new window. This could confuse novice users because they have to close the window or find the other browser window rather than use the "back" button to access the profile page again. 8. No "who's online" feature. Finding "who's online" locally is a fundamental feature and shouldn't be hard to achieve. Not only will it encourage users to login to the site more often to be seen by other members, but it will also make people happy that they can access people who are online now. 9. Not allowing a search by partial username. Expecting members to remember exact usernames is neither realistic nor user-friendly. 10. Placing a limit on the Daily 5 The new "Daily 5" feature is great, but why limit playing time? Why should users have to wait 24 hours to do more of the fun stuff?