Didn’t Spark just update their web properties a while back? Was it really necessary to say “Please make sure your selection is accurate to get your best matches” on the page where you identify your gender?

I like how they explain new features.

But look at this traffic graph, it’s all over the place. Was another site redesign what JDate needs right now? We’ll see as we monitor the traffic in coming months. They do post to the JDate blog daily, which is a lot more than I can say for many dating sites.

No related posts.

Looks like PlentyOfFish is starting to realize that design matters. A new logo and cleaner home page are evident. They removed Instant Messaging last week. Good riddance I say. Lack of monitoring is the downfall of chat on most dating sites and the POF forums are where the conversation is happening.

No related posts.

Zoosk has introduced a new home page. Details on the new design and experience can be found at There’s No Place Like Home. The new home page supports Zoosk’s efforts to bridge the gap between social networking and online dating to bring a better, more natural experience to daters through a social dating community.

I’m can’t say I’m a fan of profile photos are displayed. I can’t stand the “lightbox” effect where the page goes dark and the image slowly displays, too slow and annoying.

Zoosk, like everyone else these days, is drinking the Twitter/Facebook lifestream Kool-Aid. I’m getting tired of looking at every little thing my friends do. Time for better controls to stem the “drinking from the firehose” problem we’re all experiencing when it comes to monitoring what shows up on our various social homepages.

No related posts.

A reader wrote in about the JDate design.

Have you visited JDate lately. It seems they hired Elmer Fudd to redesign their website.

First, in the past, I could display the search gallery on my screen. In the past, they had introduced the silly member spotlight, which seems to pick randomly select individuals display at the top of the search. I say it’s random because it picks matches I’ve already clicked “no” to. You’d think it wouldn’t be hard to program it to look for these and skip them. But a dating site hiring a competent programmer?

Now they’ve enlarged it to take 1/4 of the page! Is their web designer far-sighted?

The profile thumbnails, which were a fine size, are now twice as large. There is no new information, so why did they do that? Oh, I forget it was that far-sighted web designer again.

The click system was a useful way to show which profiles I’ve visited. Now I can’t see which profiles I clicked on because it’s the same color as everything else. So the web designer is colorblind too.

And lest I forget a while ago, they changed the profile layout, so instead of displaying everything on one page, it requires four, which means I have manually 4 pages if I want to save it to disk. This still hasn’t been fixed.

BTW, I couldn’t tell them all this in the contact form because they’re limited to 500 characters. Do their customer service reps have a problem with reading comprehension?

Members all have an opinion about how to improve your website and everyone is an expert. Someday, when websites adapt to each user, this won’t be so much of an issue.

No related posts.

Last night I visited the Microsoft Startup Labs in Cambridge for Refresh Boston. The speaker was Matthew Oliphant, Senior Interaction Designer & Usability Specialist at Mathworks, who presented Usability: Getting it Right the First Time.

More and more of my work is centered around improving conversion and retention rates and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Matthew talk about the challenges of working with companies in order to improve the usability of their products and services. Many dating sites are built on templates which have never been analyzed by a usability expert, which means hundreds of sites exist that underperform due to a weak user experience. I’ll have more on this soon.

No related posts.

Over the past month or two Match has been rolling out a number of design and functionality updates. To begin with, the familiar black header has been replaced with a blue one. Match has thrown out any sort of cohesive design pattern, everything looks like it’s being modularized, perhaps to make it easier to work with third-parties like MSN.

The Connections page has been redone. Now we can see less of our “dashboard” view than before. Main view has been reduced to two columns, pretty much the same functionality, I thought the way was fine.

Once you breath a sigh of relief over the loss of the black graphics, clicking on the What’s New tab is where things start to get interesting. Match has found inspiration in Facebook’s Wall and built one of their own by reformatting the content from your Connections tab and turning it into a wall, or lifestream. As far as I can tell your wall displays who has emailed, winked and viewed your profile, as well as that your and your favorite’s profiles have been updated as well as who I have added as a favorite.

The profile update note is a half-measure which should display something about what was changed, which is much more interesting. It’s all about driving engagement and pageviews, best to tease people into clicking.

Match was smart to insert items like “Want updates sent to your mobile phone?” with a link to pay them $4.99 to get emails on the go. Who pays for that?

Another item is a call to action to “Meet your best matches. Based on profile details, you’re looking for each other.”

What happens in six months when the Wall feature is not new anymore? I’d like to make the Wall my default view. And why can’t I drag-n-drop Connections in the order I want?

Match has always done a lackluster job of explaining how their site works and what’s changed. I guess they feel that they can expose people to features and functionality and make a few bucks (albeit on features that I don’t feel are worth charging for) at the same time.

All social networking make their walls accessible as an RSS feed. I’m sure Match has concerns about average folks figuring out how to read the feed and third parties doing nefarious things with your private data. Still, as a power user, give me the tools I need to use Match the way I want to use it instead of the watered-down, generic please-everyone features they have to offer middle America. Just don’t make it as complicated as Facebook.

I for one hope the overlords at Match will create a dating application for my iPhone. I would pay $4.99 for that in a heartbeat. Build the flirting app on top of Viximo’s new development platform, sweet.

The ads continue to be un-targeted junk. K&B Toys and Olive Garden? Sigh. Where’s the targeted ads coming from IAC’s new uber-ad platform? Ads are obviously low on the list of priorities.

I like that they have added a note at the bottom of the page that the privacy policy was updated on November 5. Where they fail is that they do not list what changed at the top of the privacy policy.

You can compare dating sites, Match vs. eHarmony and Yahoo Personals. A generic feature matrix based on three-year old data. Absolutely useless. How about comparing how many people are in your area-code?

The other feature addition worth mentioning is the Daily5, which is another way to put people in front of you that Match thinks are a good match for you. This is just like OKCupid’s Quiver. They relax your search criteria constraints by a few years and 50 miles or so. I’ve written about this a lot.

Results are all over the map, some people love it, others are getting people 200 miles away and 10 years older. Match says they will continue to improve it. I hope they do.

Next up, my conversation with Mandy Ginsberg, General Manager of Match North America.

Related posts:

1. Match My Boys Product Placement Update
2. Match.com Update
3. update on Match.com founder

Cambridge, MA based Viximo has launched TrueFlirt, an application that enables users to send and receive virtual flirts via mobile phone. Viximo is first and foremost a virtual goods company: think roses on HotOrNot or Facebook gifts. They have produced a video describing their virtual goods marketplace, a complete end-to-end virtual goods marketplace which brings together content creators, gift display, billing and publishing.

I’ve never reviewed an iPhone app before so I paid $5.99 to downoad TrueFlirt (iPhone only at this time ) and started exploring the application. Disclaimer: Viximo has been a client of Digicraft, my consulting company.

Configuring TrueFlirt was straightforward, although I had to add my birthday backwards, starting with the year, then the day, then the month, which took some figuring out. Once I got the application configured, I checked out the pre-loaded environments, which are broken down into categories: Playful, Romantic and Sexy.

First, you select one of the three categories. Then you can either preview the scenes in each or email one directly to one of the contacts on your phone or enter in a new phone number. Thankfully the application features few buttons, and the interactivity in each scene is highlighted for the first few seconds.
Interactivity features include: Blow, tap swipe, pinch, shake and tilt. At the beginning of each scene the interactivity options for each scene are highlighted for a few seconds so you have an idea of what’s possible. I can imagine that someone is going to have fun creating apps that feature Easter Eggs. (hidden features you stumble across in an application.)This bachelor pad was fun to explore, lot’s to things to tap and see what happens.
The graphics are amazing, so much more nuanced than the usual Flash stuff you see online. The iPhone is quite capable of rendering beautiful scenery and objects, even on my first-generation model. There are not a lot of scenes right now, but the ones TrueFlirt launched with are a solid indication of what’s possible.
Clicking the two people in this scene brought them together in an embrace, which clicking on the background and the bench triggers other events.
The audio volume of each scene varies widly, from whisper-quiet to ear-bleedingly loud. The design of the scenes reminds me of a Tim Burton film, somewhat haunting, dark and edgy. There are only a few producers out there at the moment, expect a lot of new scenes in coming months. The People screen was empty initially, filling up with previous recipients of my flirts, which makes it easy to send additional scenes to a list of people. Sending a scene to someone couldn’t be easier, select a contact or enter a phone number. Viximo has even created a development platform called VixML to help content creators with no iPhone development experience get started creating virtual goods.

From TechCrunch:

VixML is based on the XML markup language, which may still be intimidating enough to scare off some prospective designers but is nowhere near as complex as an actual programming language. Using a number of pre-designated tags, the VixML WYSIWYG SDK and emulator, designers can create rich, multimedia mini-apps in a matter of days that would have previously taken weeks or months of programing. Basic tags allow developers to make their applications sensitive to a number of common iPhone user inputs, including shaking, blowing into the microphone, swiping and tapping with fingers, and tilting the phone. The platform also includes support for an integrated 3D graphics engine for nifty particle effects.

There are several issues with the way that applications are approved, first by Viximo, then by Apple. hopefully the process will be as smooth as possible. After all, Viximo is basically bringing something close to Flash to the iPhone, which Apple hasn’t been able to do yet. Expect people to build lots of non-flirt related apps with VixML.

Viximo has done a fantastic job broadening the appeal of their platform and services. VixML is no small undertaking and by opening up their market, they have avoided being pigeon-holed into the dating market, which, as with anything new, is slowly warming up to the idea of virtual goods.

I’ll be talking about virtual goods during my talk about revenue generation for dating sites at iDate. If you’re interested in learning how to derive additional revenue from your members I hope you’ll stop by.

The Boston Globe has more about TrueFlirt, Viximo celebrates iPhone flirting.

No related posts.

Match has gone through a pretty radical redesign. Nobody I’ve talked to is a big fan of what they did with the Connections page, but I like the new Daily 5 feature, which is similar to what OkCupid recently launched. I’ll dig into the new features and look later on this week. What do you think of the new layout?

Sending another email to people with their Daily Five brings people back to the site more to check on their potential matches. Increases logins and pageviews, which is good, but the matches are no different than a basic search, which I already get emails from.

The overall design refresh is ok, gone are the black headers which I don’t miss one bit. The site now looks like a bunch of modules displayed on the page, lacking a coherent design but seems to load much faster.

Match.com in the UK is featuring personality testing. According to a personality testing guru, it’s a rebranded version of the Chemistry.com matching system.

Back in the day, Match has personality tests powered by WeAttract. Match fell afoul of the WeAttract terms of service, because they were using, or going to use it, on their UK site. Match got rid of the matching system, which was picked up by Yahoo, which did a nice job integrating test results with searching and profiles.

I talked to WeAttract about this last year, they said they were in the middle of legal proceedings with Match and couldn’t talk much about the situation.

Search for WeAttract and you’ll find everything I’ve written about the company and it’s role with Match and Yahoo.

The 30-minute test will take users through 56 questions, some based on images, to help those searching for a partner. Early results show 88% of members were completing the test. (Via NewMediaAge magazine. and Online Personals Watch.)

No related posts.

Changes to website design and functionality that used to take months of planning are taking less time due to the evolution of web services and dating site platforms.

On my other blog, The Progress Bar, I wrote about how changes to website design and functionality that used to take months of planning are taking less time due to the evolution of web services and dating site platforms.

There’s also a fun story about how eBay changed it’s home page background color.

Related posts:

1. Century Media Social Networking Development
2. Smartypants only on this new dating site
3. Userplane wins award

I had to point out the irony of the latest Myspace newsletter announcing the all-new Myspace profile editor. Back in the early days, people quickly figured that a bug in the Myspace templates allowed one to change fonts colors and layouts easily, which led to the riotous visual and aural assault one has come to expect from the venerable social networking giant. Many websites exist that will customize your profile with whatever eye candy you want, from illicit rap lyrics to porn starlets to an iPod.

I was not impressed with the before and after views of Tom’s profile, only the background colors of the page have changed.

But wait, there are theme, or skins, to choose from. The featured theme is of course a tie-into a movie, the Fantastic Four. The other one is for Die Hard. That’s it? The profile editor is officially in beta, a known excuse to roll out a feature or functionality before it’s ready. Hopefully Myspace will add more themes soon, otherwise you’re just giving free promotion to a movie you haven’t even seen yet.

The Myspace profile support page is full of tutorials to further customize your crazy-cool personalized profile.

No related posts.