Yahoo Personals Usability Testing Report

Yahoo! Personals is one of the most popular dating sites on the Web. Because I am familiar with this site, the test is not 100 percent accurate, but I tried to focus on registering to the site as a user who doesn’t already own a Yahoo! account.

I determined five tasks:

1. Register to the dating site.
2. Subscribe (pay) to join the dating site.
3. View Who’s Online in my area.
4. Send an email to a member.
5. View my sent email and discover its status.

Because of some of the difficulties I encountered on the site, all of those tasks took too long to complete so I decided to skip the subscription and emailing part. I may create another video for that.

Watch the usability test video:

Video summary and suggestions:

1. When a new user reaches the home page, it’s hard to figure out how to register. There is only one obvious “Call to Action” but it’s for searching, not joining. That’s a mistake. It would be a better idea to add a clear “Join Now” button for users who want to sign up.
2. Registration is very cumbersome and requires leaping through a number of hoops. I would suggest taking the user directly to the Yahoo! Personals registration page and automatically create a Yahoo! account. The information I had to complete was almost identical. Filling out two forms is not a good user experience.
3. Firefox is NOT a “rare” browser. Based on this page, almost 20 percent of users use Firefox, and I am sure the number is even bigger in the US. Maybe this is an old message that should be updated.
4. There is no “Who’s Online” link at the top of the page. That makes it hard for me to do what I *really* want to do: find people in my area who are currently online. It would be great if I had a link that showed the following information by default:
   • People of the opposite sex
   • Who are now online
   • Who are in the preferred age range that I specified during registration
   • Who have pictures
   • Sorted by proximity to me.
5. The site won’t allow me to choose two parameters simultaneously on the search results.
6. Nor will it let me filter the results by people with photos on the search results.
7. The site doesn’t have the the “online now” icon on search results. I have to hover over the picture to see if this person is currently on the site.
8. When I filter by “online,” nothing seems to happen.

The good stuff:

• The site is clean and easy on the eyes.
• The profile layout is excellent and easy to understand.
• I like the fact that I can see some of the profile by hovering the photo on search result.