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In preparation for delivering the information architecture for a client’s new dating site, I’ve visited many different types of community-driven websites. One thing I’ve noticed is how many dating sites have changed their design over the last 18 months, after leaving the same design up for several years.
I often equate dating site members with the goldfish bowl concept. It’s said that a goldfish has a memory of only a few seconds, each lap around the bowl brings them back to the same place, which appears entirely different to the fish.
Dating sites, with members that stick around for only three months on average, can take advantage of the goldfish concept, trying new designed, features and functionality without worrying too much about alienating members. Granted, Match.com’s new black background is heinous by most accounts, but look a little deeper and you’ll see the profile and search pages finally getting down to fighting weight after years of seemingly random input from different design teams.
EBay used to receive thousands of emails every time they changed a font size.
This story about changing the eBay home page in the New York Times was especially interesting:
In 1998, eBay’s chief executive, Meg Whitman, changed the background color of the site’s home page from gray to white. Rather than simply switching colors overnight, though, Ms. Whitman directed eBay’s engineers to bleach the gray over the course of 30 days. At the end of the month, the company asked users if they noticed anything different. No one did.
Many times websites will schedule large annual or bi-annual website redesigns. This goes against a primary ethos of the Internet, which is more akin to point releases of software, at least in my mind. Fixes and changes can be developed, tested and deployed quickly if the underlying infrastructure is set up with quickturnarounds in mind. Sadly, for most dating sites, this is not the case.
One of the things I liked most about Consumating during it’s early days was that founder Ben Brown would hear about a bug or a feature request, and if it made sense, he would sit down with a beer and crank out the fix or feature. Not many sites have the liberty of such a development process, but it’s something that bigger sites should strive for. Even if they come up short, the phrase “maybe next quarter” should be a thing of the past given recent advances in web development.
Just look at what companies are doing on the FaceBook Platform. Soon we will witness a new cadre of Internet companies, increasingly nimble and able to respond to the marketplace in weeks instead of days, days instead of weeks, and in some cases, immediately.
I love the idea of frequent gradual change. Of course, there are always people that live by major releases, but as the Internet evolves, most websites and web services will graduate to a more fluid existence. Even eBay.
