Posted in Online Dating by merav | 12,823 views | Comment
Tags: match
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?
"UsabilityTesting.tv is a great way to see your site as visitors do. Too often its difficult to be objective with your own work. UsabilityTesting.tv helps you remove those blinders and get specific action items to improve your site" 
I saw your excellent video/article about the “Top 10 Usability Mistakes on Match.com” and I certainly agree with all of them. I have been a paying member for about 8 years, and I’ve encountered all these frustrations. I would like to share my list:
1. The “Daily 5″ Yes/No/Maybe buttons do not work reliably under the Mozilla FireFox browser (version 2 or 3). When the user pokes on any of them, the page is refreshed as if it were going to go to the next person, but then it just stays on that current person. It’s somewhat random — sometimes the buttons function after poking 3 to 20 times, and sometimes even poking 50+ times doesn’t result in moving to the next person, which necessitates firing up Internet Explorer.
2. The “Daily 5″ profiles don’t show all the information about each person. For that, you have to open up a separate tab and do the search via their username to view their profile, since (once again) they’ve left off a link to the people’s pages.
3. You can only have a maximum of 100 favorites (yes, after 8 years, I bumped up against that limit). Many times I come home too tired from work to respond to a potential lady, so I’ll just favorite her until I feel like sending an e-mail. After a while, I wound up with about 60 defunct favorites pushing me to the 100 limit.
4. The site is agonizingly slow. Tonight the average seems to be about 46 sec/page display. (I know this constipation is limited to Match.com, because all the other sites I try are instantaneous via my cable modem).
5. Their e-mail tech support is worse than useless. I’ve reported problem #1 three times in the last 4 months, and each time they send me a generic boilerplate e-mail about “How to Log In to Match.com”, despite my explicit instructions in each of those e-mails requesting that they not just send me an unrelated boilerplate response.
6. They have arbitrary and changing limits on the number of characters that the user may type into their description fields. They seem to allow 15+ photos (which each take at least 20K I estimate), but they limit me to 500 or 1000 characters in some fields ?
7. There is a button on the My Match page to see “Who’s Favorited Me”, but when you follow that link, it takes you to a useless page that has more shiny/happy people graphics with the text: “Who’s on your Favorites list? Search and save someone to your list. The more active you are on Match.com, the greater the chance of ending up on someone else’s Favorites list. [Search now>>]”
8. When you go “Back” to the search screen to re-do a search, it sometimes flushes the parameters you’ve previously entered. While doing so, it will also set checkboxes that you didn’t set yourself during the last search. (I haven’t done this in awhile, and the sluggishness of the site deters me from trying it right now).
9. You cannot search for someone in a foreign country who is searching for someone from your particular area. You can only look at the individual profiles one-at-a-time and see if they’re amenable to relocating near you.
10. When you use CTRL+ to resize the text on any of their pages, it just messes the display up.